Beyond Blue Sky: The Plaza Hub as a Magic Circle

Welcome to Beyond Blue Sky, where I pull out all the stops and share my very wildest and wackiest ideas and observations. Attention, Bobsled riders: thar be squalls ahead and there's no turning back now!

Boy, those Disney marketers sure love to spam the word magic, don't they? (Also dreams and wishes and believe, but magic is our focus here.) Disneyland is the Magic Kingdom, even if the name officially belongs to its Orlando counterpart. Advertising invites you to “experience the magic.” Or “share the magic.” Or “bring home the magic.” The short street running alongside the main parking area for the resort is called Magic Way. The year 2000 brought us the 45 Years of Magic Parade and the fireworks show “Believe...There's Magic in The Stars.” The holiday fireworks are still called “Believe...in Holiday Magic.” “Mickey and the Magical Map,” currently showing in the Fantasyland Theatre,” draws full audiences (and deservedly so—I'm not claiming that the mere presence of an overused word automatically taints anything associated with it). We're due to have the MyMagic+ system imported from Florida, thereby allowing guests to reserve time on attractions, appointment-style, with their Magic Bands. And that's just what comes off the top of my head.

That's a whole lotta “magic.” And the irony is that those marketers are probably completely unaware that the very geography of Disneyland hearkens back to ancient traditions of real magic, in the sense of mysticism and spellcraft.

Much has been made of the park's innovative hub-and-spoke layout, and there's certainly a lot to praise there—the sight of Sleeping Beauty Castle inevitably draws guests down Main Street, and then at the Hub they are given the choice of which theme to explore, with elaborate gateways hinting at what lies ahead in each direction. Observant folks have noted how very appropriately the individual lands are placed. Frontierland is in the West where it belongs, and as it represents America's past, on the opposite side is Tomorrowland, representing America's future. A similar if less perfect balance can be found on the north-south axis—Main Street, USA, an idealized version of the everyday small town (reality), stands opposite Fantasyland, an idealized version of children's imagination (fantasy).

Where does that leave Adventureland? In limbo, apparently. With its approach path from the Hub skewing off at an oblique angle rather than occupying one of the cardinal points, Adventureland doesn't fit into this scheme. However, allow me to offer an alternative that not only covers Adventureland but would not be complete without it. I call this the Magic Circle model.

First, a little background. Picture a classic “storybook wizard.” Disney's own Merlin will do—an old man with a long white beard, wearing a tall conical hat and a long robe, whose extraordinary magical powers are accessed via chanting the right words (often vaguely Latin-esque) and waving a wand. This image comes down to us from practitioners of ceremonial magic in medieval and Renaissance Europe. These sorcerers and alchemists believed that the key to magic was meticulous ritual—inscribing perfect symbols, saying exactly the right words in exactly the right way, using flawless magical ingredients, and timing it all to coincide with precise astronomical events. According to their philosophy, if you got everything exactly right, without the slightest deviance from the formula—and if your will was unwavering—then your spells would work. And every ritual began with the delineation of a magic circle.

The purpose of the magic circle was basically to tell the universe: Magic is going on here! Actually, it was a little more involved than that. The idea was to establish a microcosm, the cosmos in miniature, in order to bring to bear that age-old principle “as above, so below” and ensure that what was done within the circle would affect the larger world. (This is the same principle by which voodoo dolls supposedly operate.) The magic circle was a liminal space, a transitional area between the mundane world we all inhabit, and the spiritual world the magician wished to contact. It was a world between worlds, neither fully Here nor all the way There but some of both.

So what does all this have to do with Disneyland?

Relax, I'm getting there.

Would you believe that the practice of drawing magic circles continues to this very day? The inheritors of this tradition, primarily Wiccans and other Neopagans, cast circles in order to formalize the start of their religious rituals. The concept of the microcosm has survived, and so no matter how simple the circle is (and in modern practice, they are usually quite simple—not the webs of arcane sigils usually depicted by Hollywood), the cardinal points of the compass will be marked in some way. The directions have symbolic associations as well as their literal meanings. Since the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, the Eastern quarter is associated with beginnings and birth and the Western quarter with conclusions and death. From the perspective of the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern quarter is associated with warmth and light, and the Northern quarter with darkness, mystery, and sometimes evil. The process of drawing a magic circle at the start of a ritual includes a short address given at each cardinal point, inviting the essences of the directions to witness the ritual and symbolically transforming the circle into the center of the universe.

Whew!

The upshot of all this is that, even without Frontierland, the Old West in miniature, in the West of Disneyland to balance it—even if there were something else there instead—Tomorrowland would still belong in the East. Tomorrow begins with the dawn, which is another term for sunrise, which occurs in the east. People often express optimism for the future—the kind of optimism that drove Walt Disney to plan Tomorrowland in the first place—with the metaphor of a sunrise or new morning.

The other original themed lands are in their right places relative to the Hub as well. Frontierland in the West is obvious enough to have already been mentioned...twice in this article alone. The North suits Fantasyland because of this area's use of imagery and design motifs from European fairy tales, where wicked witches lurk in dark forests. That just leaves the South for...Main Street? Nope. Adventureland. (See? I told you Adventureland was part of the model.) Main Street may be due south of the Plaza Hub, but Adventureland is conceptually south of it. It represents the tropical regions of the world (the “global south” in geopolitical terms), where it's always warm and sunny and life is abundant. And check out this view from Google Maps:

The faint green line is the main path between the Plaza Hub and Adventureland, while the dark green bar is the approximate location of the gateway. You'll notice that, although the walkway starts out heading west-by-southwest, almost immediately after passing through the gateway itself, it turns nearly due south before curving again southwest to continue into the land. Moreover, that southbound portion of walkway is pointed directly at the Jungle Cruise river (blue squiggle in the bottom left corner)—remember that on Opening Day, the Jungle Cruise was just about the only thing there was to do in Adventureland. There is no doubt in my mind but that Adventureland was situated and designed the way it was in order to take guests south again from the Hub after they had gone north along Main Street to get there.

But it gets better.

Let's leave the cardinal directions for a moment to discuss the four Classical Elements. You might be familiar with these even if you aren't into mysticism, because they're all over fantasy fiction. The ancient Greeks, lacking true scientific knowledge, conjectured that everything in the universe was made of (Fans of Avatar: the Last Airbender, recite with me!) water, earth, fire, and air, in varying proportions. Like the cardinal directions, the Elements were believed to have a metaphysical dimension as well as a physical one—fire wasn't just flame that you could see with your eyes and heat that you could feel with your skin, but also anger, passion, energy, destructive impulses. The other Elements likewise had associations with mental and emotional states, virtues, vices, and ways of being beyond the substances they were named after.

Like magic circles, the Classical Elements are still part of the practices of modern mystics and pagans. In fact, the two are connected. This is where it gets really good, folks—when invoking each cardinal direction during the creation of a magic circle, the magician also invokes the Element that goes with that direction. Four directions, four elements. Fire, the hottest and lightest Element, goes with the South, the direction of warmth. It is balanced in the cold North by Earth, the heaviest and most solid Element. Northern forests also come into play again, as plant life, springing from the soil, is usually considered part of the Earth element. Air goes with East, since refreshing breezes are easy to associate with cool mornings. And Water goes with the West—not only due to the common association with death (crossing the river Styx, etc.), but because to the ancient Europeans who originally worked this stuff out, there was a big old honkin' impassable ocean in the west.

Now turn your attention back to that map of Disneyland. You can probably deduce where this is going already. Not only are the original themed lands logically placed with respect to the compass directions, each one proudly displays its corresponding Element in abundance. They were there on Opening Day and have only gotten stronger over time.

Adventureland, the hot South, has Fire in the form of tiki torches, Pele the volcano goddess, the campfires of jungle explorers, and the magma chamber in the Temple of the Forbidden Eye. You might also count the Genie from Aladdin (still appearing for meet-and-greets in Aladdin's Oasis), since in Arabic mythology, the djinn are “spirits of smokeless fire.”

Frontierland, the wild West, contains the single largest Water feature in the entire park—the Rivers of America, containing no fewer than four of Frontierland's current attractions and once host to yet more, including the impressive fountain-in-a-mountain Cascade Peak. Kinetic water also features in the landscaping around Big Thunder Mountain, and the Big Thunder Trail passes by a pond where mechanical fish leap.

Fantasyland, the mystical North, offers Earth in the gem mine of the Seven Dwarfs, the gardens and miniature forests of Storybook Land, and of course the mighty Matterhorn, Disneyland's largest and most visible mountain. Wordplay gives us another form of Earth in Fantasyland—the Earth, the whole planet, condensed in “it's a small world.”

Tomorrowland, the optimistic East, presents Air as both a goal and a challenge. It postulates a world where even ground vehicles are placed on elevated tracks and thus move through the air, where rocket ships casually penetrate the atmosphere, where even the architecture is drawn upward, to the sky, and dominated by the sky's emblematic colors of white and blue. Everything in Tomorrowland is designed to give an impression of being lightweight and ready to break the bonds of gravity.

And it all comes together at the Plaza Hub! While the central portion of the Hub is pretty consistent with the design sensibilities of Main Street, the outer ring, the part that physically connects to the other lands, partakes of their theming in the vicinity of each gateway. In fact, the boundaries separating the Hub from each land are fairly fuzzy. The entrance to the Enchanted Tiki Room is in front of the Adventureland gateway rather than behind it, and significant chunks of Fantasyland real estate sit out in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle, encroaching on the Hub. (This article does a great job of showcasing specific instances of these encroachments, as well the fuzziness of inter-land boundaries within Disneyland in general.)

This makes the Hub a close cousin of the ceremonial magician's magic circle in the sense of being a microcosm of the world. The “world” in this case is Disneyland Park, with its four major themed realms located at the four cardinal points (or just slightly askew of them out of necessity) and embodying the four Classical Elements, and all reproduced in miniature at the center. The Hub is a true liminal space, a world between the worlds. It's not Adventureland, but it's got some tropical greenery in a planter toward the South. It's not Frontierland, but there's evidence of pioneers over in the West. It's not Fantasyland, but the low walls to the North look like castle stones. It's not Tomorrowland, but those rocks in the East just might come from another planet. From here, we can get to any of the realms, as easily as crossing the street. (Easier, actually, since the local traffic moves at the speed of trolley horse.) The decisions we make here will affect the course of our journey throughout this Magic Kingdom. As above, so below!

Speaking of the street, I hear you cry...what about Main Street? You know, the part of Disneyland that actually is due south of the Hub? The part everyone has to traverse to get to the Hub in the first place? What direction does it occupy in this “magic circle” and what Element does it represent?

I'm so glad you asked!

Main Street still has a place in the Magic Circle model. In fact, it still has its original place: the aforementioned part you have to traverse to get to the Hub in the first place. In the metaphor, Main Street is the process of creating the magic circle. It is placed in the literal south only because humans can't walk in three dimensions (and to give incoming guests the best possible view of that awesome Castle), but symbolically, it's Up the Ladder to Heaven, or possibly Down the Rabbit Hole. (Journeys into the spirit world can be expressed as either ascents or descents.) Its Element is thus the legendary “fifth Element”—call it Spirit or Mind or Void, but whatever you call it, it both underlies and transcends the other four. The ultimate goal of the true magician is not to conquer the world, but to conquer himself.

Whoa. Pretty heavy stuff for a theme park, right? If it makes you feel any better, I don't think Walt and the Imagineers consciously designed Disneyland with the occult in mind. For one thing, magic circles and the creation thereof were hardly mainstream knowledge in the United States at the time—Wicca was starting to pick up speed in England as of the 1950s, but it would be another decade before it crossed the Pond. Instead, the park's layout probably came about because it feels right. It makes intuitive sense.

On the other hand, intuitive sense was surely the guiding principle behind the Classical Elements and their associations with the cardinal directions (as well as seasons, times of day, phases of life, etc.) in the first place. Any number of geographic, historical, and cultural accidents contributed to the way the people of Old Europe viewed the world, but once that view took shape, it was handed down through the generations and ultimately passed on, in however reduced and subliminal a form, to Americans such as Walt Disney. So while Disneyland probably wasn't planned as a deliberate reference to the magic circles of old times and new, it is not entirely coincidental that similarities exist.

And isn't that...well...fantastic? That merely by going with the flow and building a theme park that appealed to their own sensibilities, the planners behind Disneyland's basic layout wound up tapping into the fundaments of actual magical practice going back to the Middle Ages and beyond? It's almost as if a hidden Muse were guiding them to make the park a Magic Kingdom not merely in the advertising copy, but in actual fact.

Supposing there is such a Muse, she might like to know her influence is being noticed. The next time you visit Disneyland, maybe take a few minutes to perambulate the Hub—clockwise, of course, lest you attract evil spirits—and pause at each gateway to appreciate what it represents. If anyone asks what you're doing, just say you're experiencing the magic.