I’ve spent far more time than is healthy for me mulling over my response to The Magic Flute and its Masonic Manichaeanism. I’ve mulled so long I’m nearly mulled all through, like a cup of hot cider.

And why was I worrying about it so much? I think it’s because I saw the opera in the afternoon on the same day I heard the Passion story in the morning, and for the first time I was struck by the superficial similarities and the fundamental differences between the two stories.

There are obvious superficial similarities, you must admit. Each hero has to go through terrible trials on his journey toward the light, and each hero successfully endures those trials and reaches his goal.

But there are big differences as soon as you go any deeper than that.

First, let’s just look at the plots as literary constructions.

In The Magic Flute, the trials themselves seem pointless. They exist only to try; they do not arise from any otherwise necessary circumstance in the plot.

Contrast that with the masterful plotting of the Passion story. There the trials exist because the hero must suffer to redeem the world; but they also rise naturally from the tawdry human motives of the villains of the piece. The two opposing chains of motivation converge naturally and inevitably, God using the evil of human nature to bring about his ultimate plan for good.

We can make a similar comparison of the characters of Tamino and Jesus, and once again I think the comparison works in favor of the Gospels.

Tamino has only one motive for enduring the trials in The Magic Flute: Sarastro is holding Princess Pamina out as bait. Before that, the Queen of the Night had been holding the princess out as bait. Tamino switches sides from darkness to light according to who seems most likely to come through with the princess at the end.

Nor can we even say much about the power of true love, because of course Tamino didn’t fall in love with Pamina; he fell in love with a picture of her, which is not at all the same thing. I know any number of young men Tamino’s age who are deeply in love with Scarlett Johansson in exactly the same way, but theirs is not the spiritual sort of love that leads them toward the light.

The portrait of Christ in the Bible, on the other hand, is both rich and heroic. He is not simply a deity in disguise, incapable of really suffering pain, but he isn’t a man whose baser instincts have to be appealed to if you want any action out of him either. He is completely human, and he knows exactly what he’s getting into. He prays that he might not have to suffer it; he sweats blood and sheds countless tears; yet in the end he willingly offers himself, not because he lusts after a pretty soprano, but because it is meet and right that he should do his Father’s will.

Tamino, too, is good at doing what he’s told, but he’s not particularly good at distinguishing whom he should allow to do the telling. He starts out doing what the Queen of the Night tells him to do and ends up doing what the priests in funny hats tell him to do. One gets the impression that he ends up on the side of virtue mostly because virtue talked to him last.

In plot and characterization, then, I have to give the Gospels the victory over the musical Masons. While I’m at it, I might as well add that I have absolutely no idea what goes on with real Masons, even though one of my grandfathers was a Mason. (The other one collected every book on the Masonic conspiracy, so you see we had balance in our family.) I have nothing to say against real Masons or their secret rituals, which by definition I know nothing about. I can only tell you what I think of the opera, which people who do research into Masonic ritual and drying paint and other exciting subjects all agree is riddled with Freemasonry.

Merely from an artistic point of view, then, I give the palm to the Passion story over The Magic Flute. As for the theology and philosophy, I leave that to Augustine, who has dealt with the subject more thoroughly than I ever could.

But all this is reckoning without the music, which is a bit unfair to the opera—something like judging Hamlet without the words. It’s the music that makes The Magic Flute for the Masons what Birth of a Nation is for the Ku Klux Klan: an emotionally overwhelming appeal for the cult. (No, I am not comparing the Masons to the Ku Klux Klan, but it has suddenly occurred to me that I could write a whole book comparing The Magic Flute to Birth of a Nation and Mozart’s style to Griffith’s. I couldn’t sell it, but I could write it.) The music is what turns a lackluster play into a masterpiece that changes lives; it’s what persuades us that the light really is beautiful and the darkness terrible, that Tamino really is a virtuous hero rather than a pliable airhead, that Sarastro really is wise rather than just verbose and sententious, and that we really might want to be part of Sarastro’s order of wise and good men.

It might be worth pointing out, then, that there’s some pretty good music on the orthodox Christian side, too. The whole Passion was set to music by J. S. Bach, and not once but possibly as many as four times—one for each Gospel. Mozart himself wrote Masses that equal his opera in artistry if not in popular appeal, and his Requiem even challenges The Magic Flute on the popular-appeal front.

Now that we’ve looked at The Magic Flute for so long, you may be asking, “What does all this have to do with the Holy Grail?”

I’m very glad you asked that question. You, on the other hand, may be regretting it already.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Blog Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.