Metamorphoses in Dune
Alexandru Maniu

In Dune, people can be both men and animals. For purely artistic reasons, the coexistence of different life forms under the same mask is a constant in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Orphism, nothing is immutable and everything is subject to change. For Ovid, this postulate must have had some limits generated by the artistic process: “nor can the arts that cure others cure their lord”. Transformed characters – so punished for ill behavior or challenging the gods – eventually acquire immortality, just like the poet himself. Deities can be either anthropomorphic or theriomorphic, yet they can change according to their own will and they don’t lose their divinity in the process.
Ovid’s metamorphoses are usually final and the poor misfortunate loses some of his humanity forever. By far the cruelest fate is for one to lose his power of speech or his free-speech, as in the case of Acteon, changed into a stag, Callisto, changed into a bear or Lycon, who becomes a wolf. On a more subtle level, the nymph Echo is left only with the power of speech, but her words are not her own, as she is forced to repeat whatever she hears.
All these stories cover a more complex level of understanding that deals with religion and ritual, and should not be taken as mere parables of morality. The myth of Artemis and Acteon encapsulates the confrontation between crude human conscience and the mystery of life, epitomized by the maternal deity (Isis, Artemis, Diana), with two possible outcomes. Meditating, we can either emphasize the superior (accomplished or perfected meditation) in Upanishad terminology or the inferior (superimposed or false meditation). The first elevates to the supernormal while the second leaves one about as Acteon: to be psychoanalyzed, finally, to bits and returned to the womb. (Campbell, 63).
The human mind’s capacity to overcome appearances is the first and foremost condition to be awarded the title of “human” in Dune, a title awarded by the Bene Gesserit witches. Facing the threat of the gom-jabbar, Paul must fight the overwhelming urge to remove his probably scorched hand from the black box. This ritual is meant to liberate the human conscience, to set it free from any barriers – both imposed and self-imposed – and from any graven image or any likeness that mimics the human mind: “In the crunch, we select individuals and we set them as free as we're able.” (Jessica to Farad’n in Children of Dune). Later on, Jessica would confer the title of “human being” to Farad’n, sole heir of House Corrino, in a ritual accompanied by these words: “I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand someday. I pray to your presence that this be so. The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.” Ovid’s characters are irreversibly limited to the pattern they describe. They are part of the existential cycle of decay and regeneration, also known as the “Ages”. Breaking the connection between one’s self and the sacred leads to fall and punishment. Thus, the metamorphosis works on two levels, one subtle and one direct. When Zeus arrives to the house of Lycon, his host was already a decadent man. His transformation took place long before Zeus established his blood thirst by changing him into a wolf. Likewise, the nymph Echo was nothing more than a witless receiver and transmitter of her sister’s words before she was transformed into a forest spirit. The same goes for Pentheus and Callisto. Metamorphosis as a form of self-deification or, more likely, as means to gain control over the destiny of humanity in order to liberate it is, in my opinion, the central theme in Children of Dune. Through the eyes of the God Emperor’s loyal subjects, this book might appear as an apocryphal gospel. It is also Frank Herbert’s eulogy of nature in its entirety, the Supreme Non-Absolute mentioned by Panoplia Prophetica: “It is said that there is nothing firm, nothing balanced, nothing durable in all the universe – that nothing remains in its state, that each day, some time each hour, brings change.” (Children of Dune, pp. 160). In the Jesus Incident, the Ship constantly demands to be worshipped without establishing any forms of worship. The characters who understand knowledge as permanent learning and adaptation prevail. The characters who constantly raise barriers, who deal in absolutes, usually fall. Paul Muad’Dib becomes the victim of his own religion. Leto tries to escape his father’s destiny. The stages of his transformation seem to replicate an ancient shamanic initiation ritual, also known as the “Way of Suffering”. Leto proceeds to use the myth hermetically, as a way to psychological metamorphosis. The spice is in this case the catalyst (or the shamanic drug) that opens up a vast array of outlets, enabling Leto to extend his horizon of experience, the depth of his realization through his spiritual death and resurrection. In so doing, he is, in a measure, “released from the local system of illusions and put in touch with mysteries of the psyche itself, which lead to wisdom concerning both the soul and its world; and he thereby performs the necessary function for society of moving it from stability and sterility in the old toward new reaches and new depths of realization.”[1]

The Way of Suffering of the shaman is the earliest example we know of a lifetime devoted to the fourth end: the serious use of myth hermetically, as mārga, as a way to psychological metamorphosis. And the remarkable fact is that the evidence points irrefutably to an achievement—at least in many cases—of a perceptible amplification of the individual's horizon of experience and depth of realization through his spiritual death and resurrection, even on the level of these first primitive explorations. The shaman is in a measure released from the local system of illusions and put in touch with mysteries of the psyche itself, which lead to wisdom concerning both the soul and its world; and he thereby performs the necessary function for society of moving it from stability and sterility in the old toward new reaches and new depths of realization.
Knowledge is a never-ending adventure at the borders of incertitude. The shamanic ritual he undergoes (the worm journey) helps him harmonize the multitude of consciousnesses that abode inside him and also transcend the barriers of time. “His awareness flowed on a new, higher level. He felt the past carried in his cells, in his memories, in the archetypes which haunted his assumptions, in the myths which hemmed him, in his languages and their prehistoric detritus. It was all of the shapes out of his human and nonhuman past, all of the lives which he now commanded, all integrated in him at last. And he felt himself as a thing caught up in the ebb and flow of nucleotides.” As his perception – both of himself and the world – becomes even more profound, he acquires the vision that will guide humanity in the future millennia. “We will give them complexities to occupy their minds. How will they know I'm dangerous unless they experience me for thousands of years? (…) We'll give them question marks.” In this lies the essence of the metamorphoses. Before acquiring the god-body, (my skin is not my own), Leto became immortal in a spiritual sense. This is the subtle level of transformation, but without which his mind wouldn’t have survived the physical metamorphoses into a worm-bodied god that will eventually eliminate almost all traces of humanity. But in Dune even gods are subjected to transformations, and almost five thousand years later, the worm-Leto will dissolve and his dormant consciousness will impregnate the Arrakean soil.

Campbell, Joseph: The Masks of God, Primitive Mythology, London, Secker and Warburg, 1960
Herbert, Frank: Dune, New English Library, 1984
Herbert, Frank: Children of Dune, Putnam, 1976
Ovid, Metamorphoses
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[1] Joseph Cambell, The Masks of God, Primitive Mythology, p 471