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Carnivāle is a period drama set in the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has an overarching story about the battle between good and evil as well as the struggle between free will and destiny.
At the beginning of the first episode, the carvinal's manager (a dwarf named Samson) says:
Before the beginning, after the great war between heaven and hell, God created the earth and gave dominion over it to the crafty ape he called man.... And to each generation was born a creature of light and a creature of darkness...and great armies clashed by night in the ancient war between good and evil. There was magic then, nobility, and unimaginable cruelty.... So it was, until the day that a false sun exploded over Trinity and man forever traded away wonder for reason.
This quotation offers a glimpse into the show's subject matter and framework.
The show consists of two plot lines that are slowly converging. The first involves a young man named Ben Hawkins, the "creature of light," who joins a travelling carnival when it passes near his Dust Bowl home. The carnival consists mainly of a freak show and a strip show (known as the cooch show), but it also has a few rides such as a tilt-a-whirl and Ferris wheel.
The second plot line revolves around a Methodist minister named Brother Justin Crowe, the "creature of darkness," who is slowly realizing the extent of his powers along with the guidance of his sister Iris in their fictional town of Mintern, California.
As the story progresses, the carnival travels west toward California and a confrontation seems inevitable. The westward movement parallels the movement of the "Okies" from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl years.
Hawkins and Crowe seem to be linked by mysterious events in the past (specifically during World War I, possibly involving their fathers), and they have been appearing in each other's dreams.
The show mixes much Christian theology and Gnostic lore together with concepts of classical Greek mythology and MasonicFreemasonry is a worldwide fraternal organization. Its members are joined together by shared ideals, of both a moral and metaphysical nature, and, in most of its branches, by a common belief in a Supreme Being. Freemasonry is an esoteric art, in that cert lore, particularly that of the Knights TemplarThe first of the military orders, the Knights Templar or Poor Knights of Christ was founded in 1118, in the aftermath of the First Crusade, to help the new Kingdom of Jerusalem maintain itself against its defeated Muslim neighbors, and to ensure the safet.