A couple of classes ago we were talking about Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, and how he had lifted it from Ovid. In Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare And the Goddess of Complete Being, Hughes calls it as a shamanic initiation dream, he says how Shakespeare,”consciously or not fashioned a timely theological fable, in which the former consort of the Goddess had now become the moral New Puritan, rejecting the old Catholic world.” With what was going on in England at the time, it almost seems that Shakespeare was taking sides with the Puritans and breaking away with the old guard. I could be completely wrong, for it seems as he poked fun at everyone. But this new reformation certainly gave him material for his work.
Hughes goes on a little further and says,” it would be an interesting experiment to narrate the plot and details of Venus and Adonis to various primitive groups, and they would recognize this poem as the dream of spontaneous shamanic initiation, the dream of ‘the call.’ I had never heard of a shamanic dream, but there was a reference to Mircea Eliade and shamanism. There are several dreams, but they all start out where someone is sick and the threat of death by the spirit if the chosen one rejects the call. But the chosen one becomes a healer and a human form changed or metamorphoses. I’ve heard about Shamans in the Amazon who take hallucinogenics and are healers, to me it sounded like a party and a good time, I never imagined that it went back to Ovid. Shakespeare’s shamanic animal is the boar and turns into a purple flower:
{the} frothy mouth bepainted all with red, Like milk and blood being mingled both together.
Quite the mixture and a drink I’m not sure if I would drink, yet it is an image I can see as clear as day. Hughes says that, “It seems to be a rule that the shamanic visitation occurs only where it is desperately needed.” All this is above my head, but it makes me wonder if Shakespeare was trying to be a healer of some sort of England or people in general and he was using the stage as an agent of change. I’m still not sure what the hell a shamanic initiation dream is, but Hughes says that The Wanderings of Oisin by Yeats can be read as a pure shamanic initiation dream. It’s a 30 page poem which I’ll take a stab at to see if I can learn anything more about a shamanic initiation dream.
To be, or not to be: 