During the Middle Ages, they were big on the Magick Circle as the proper means to perform Magick-Use (an idea that they believed that they inherited from the ancient Egyptians, passed on through the Greeks). We know this because the Middle Ages produced a great number of grimoires, the best known being the various versions of the Book attributed to Solomon. During the Elizabethan Age (the latter 1500s), they had a ferocious vogue for both Theater and Magick-Use; put these two together and you have Theater that depicts Magick-Use, which they took seriously enough to be very conscientious about how they presented it on the stage.
Since theater “acts things out” for us, we can see that their idea of Circle-Casting was essentially the same as ours; there is no real difference between what we do today, when we Cast a Circle, and what they did during Elizabeth’s time. Barnaby Barnes (a fellow play-writer in Shakespeare’s company) gives us two admirably detailed Circle-Castings in The Devil’s Charter; Shakespeare provides us with a Circle-Casting in Henry VI, Part II (I.iv), although regrettably without Barnes’s copious description (Shakespeare’s stage-notes refer obliquely to the “ceremonies belonging” to the Making of a Circle and let the matter go at that).
Marlowe’s Faustus (I.iii) is another play in which the Magick-Using scholar conjures a Circle (in part by Saluting the Four Elements), and so Circle-Casting enters the Faust legend- memorably put on film in 1926 by F.W. Murnau.
Sort of the Spielberg of the Weimar Republic, Murnau invests his scenes with what must have been amazing special effects at the time. (The flight scene still astonishes with its degree of accomplishment.) The pertinent point for us arrives when Faust summons Mephisto- by Casting a Magick Circle.
Please note at the start of the scene (1) the full moon hanging overhead, and (2) the cross-roads that Faust approaches to perform his Magick. The book which he has with him is his Magickal Grimoire- note how he first shapes the Circle with his Book, which he then presents to the Four Directions (in order to Quarter the Circle).
Then- and this is what I love- through the marvel of Silent Film German ingenuity, we see Faust’s Circle burst into power, in possibly the first presentation of the activated Magick Circle in the history of film. Special effects cause the Circle’s Energies to Rise into the Universe; more special effects signal the approach of Mephisto. A comet crashes to the earth- and the Dark One is present. “You summoned me; I have arrived.”
The whole movie is very gripping (it holds up very well); most fascinating is a 1926 view of a Wizard conjuring the Space of the Magick Circle. Check it out:
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