"Romeo and Juliet", The Old Religion, Human Sacrifice and Hidden Alchemy Shakespeare

The Old Gods Die Slowly If At All

A friend sent me an article called “Romeo and Juliet In A Nutshell” by Joseph Pearce for Crisis Magazine, a publication associated with the Catholic Church, and he asked my opinion. Mr. Pearce got a few things right in his Nutshell- that Romeo & Juliet is not a play about romance or love, it’s a play about lust and the inevitable punishment of that lust. But as usual with Shakespeare, things are not that simple. Oh no.

I was pleased that Mr. Pearce and I agreed on an observation that most of us miss, since ‘Shakespeare’ was an expert at hiding many deeper meanings under exquisite poetry. In a close reading of Romeo and Juliet, if one stays immune from the manipulation by the surface emotions, you find a sinister scenario that has it’s roots in the ancient cultures that still practiced a form of human sacrifice, and discover that Romeo and Juliet is actually a horror show that is incessantly violent and highly sexualized with multiple levels pagan, Gnostic and alchemical symbolism. In a typically dense Shakespearean format, indeterminate and full of antithesis, but clearly portraying the death of Juliet to be the culmination of an ancient ritual called pharmakos, a form of human sacrifice practiced in ancient Greece that was meant to bring peace to the city-state, which is what happens in the Verona of the play. Romeo and Juliet hides a portrayal of human sacrifice, but with a modern twist. The play itself is a modern pharmakos, a theatrical form of alchemy. Juliet is raised as a golden statue at the culmination, which few realize is exactly how the play ends.

In the play, Friar Lawrence, a Roman Catholic priest, weds 13 yr. old Juliet to Romeo, a boy of indeterminate age but about 17 or 18. Following Friar’s decision to marry them, much death ensues, and although viewers and critics such as Mr. Pearce always give the Friar a pass, that response from the audience is the core of the brilliance of the playwright. Friar, examined dispassionately, is duplicitous, manipulative and orchestrates the death of Romeo and Juliet as part of a grander strategy. One of the keys to this understanding is that the Friar states that he hopes the marriage of Romeo and Juliet will bring peace to Verona, and that is exactly what happens, but only because their deaths are so shocking. The play ends with old man Montague promising to raise Juliet Capulet as a statue of gold, in a union of opposites, revealing Friar as a social (and literal!) alchemist. The sources for this reading are easy to spot throughout the play if you divest yourself of the strong emotions that the poetry of sex and violence engender

Another key is that the Nurse, Friar’s sex obsessed assistant, shepherds Juliet to Romeo and Romeo to Juliet. Mercutio (Mercury) is the active agent, as in physical alchemy, triggering the transmutation of Friar’s materials, the Montagues and Capulets, with Juliet the virgin as most important. The city of Verona is Friar’s laboratory. His magickal alchemical ‘working’ is a success: peace comes to the city, the very goal of ancient pharmakos. The dead Juliet is now a statue of pure gold.

This is a brief companion essay to my 3-hour podcast episode that goes through Romeo and Juliet scene by scene. By necessity it’s missing many of the incriminating details found in the text, some of which are quite shocking. Romance and doomed love are a masterful misdirection, even a ruse, as the play viciously mocks romantic love, putting Juliet through extreme levels of torture while hiding the pharmakos ritual once practiced openly, a ritual the alchemist Friar must of course hide in the modern Catholic Verona of the play, a ritual the playwright must hide from the audience, so as to make it effective, because the hidden life is best and Shakespeare is social alchemy.

Friar, alchemist sun worshipper, denizen of the crypt

The Scenario: Friar is in league with Nurse, Juliet’s longtime caregiver. They work together using Romeo as bait to lure in the virgin Juliet, in order to bury her alive as an ancient Vestal Virgin for transgressing her vow of chastity. For the denouement, Shakespeare triples the dark fun- three young people lie in pools of blood in a crypt, one murdered, two suicides, a scene any horror story would envy. Romeo and Juliet ais a horror story. The evidence is right there in the text of the play. Let’s have a look.

Act 1 Scene 1

Raunchy sexual slang and sexual imagery linked to violence and death start the play immediately with the very first lines and then permeates the entire play almost non-stop. How full of love and romance is that? Act I Scene I opens with two young members of the Capulet clan gleefully discussing rape. This followed by a violent interaction with the Montague clan. This conflation of sex and violence continues throughout the play until the gruesome ending. Sex = violence = death = sex. It’s right there on the very surface of the play. Somehow, and astonishingly so, the play is thought to be romantic and appropriate for children. I’ll explain how that works below. The true meaning is masterfully veiled. The playwright is devious, underhanded, manipulative and mocking in the extreme, no doubt bringing a hearty chuckle to those in the know.

The dialogue needs to be read, as it flies by on stage or screen, and in modern productions a lot of dialogue is usually cut.

The Details

The sun is referred to as a god eight times in the play, the first time in the first act, where the sun is called the “worshipped sun”. The sun is referenced 19 times overall, the moon 5 times and Diana, as goddess of the moon, is mentioned twice. There is an insistent motif of the interplay of light and dark which has been pointed out by many critics. Romeo and Juliet, by word and deed, choose darkness and the night. For them this does not bode well, and becomes the source of their punishment.