A lot of the character formation and ethical training that is a foundational part of the new curriculum for members of the Starry Bull tradition is communicated through aphorisms (called ἀκούσματα, χρεῖαι, ἀπόφθεγματα or γνῶμαι depending on their nature) some of which are harvested from antiquity (especially the Pythagoreans and other Presocratics who loved that shit, as well as enigmatic lines from an assortment of lyricists, dramatists and later ethical philosophers) and modern flowerings, some of which are intentional coinages and others sprouted up on their own from the lived experiences and culture of previous iterations of the Starry Bull.

Two examples of the latter are:

Κύκλοι, και τα λοιπά.
“Circles, etc.”

And:

Διόνυσος σοφός ἐστιν.
“Dionysos is wise.”

These were not chosen at random; indeed, they form a cohesive and complimentary pair.

One of the things that they share is being so obvious as to almost constitute tautologies, which of course conceals the depth of their true significance that can only be discovered by experience, reflection and time (ἐμπειρίᾳ, σκέψει καὶ χρόνῳ.)

The Neoplatonists, for instance, derived Dionysos’ name from Διὸς νοῦς (“the Mind of Zeus”) employing the jazz-riff method so beloved of the school, often deeply symbolic and associative and and intended to disclose profound theological and philosophical truths rather than contribute to the science of historical linguistics. (Kratylos being a perfect example; you can smell the wine from the page needed to reach some of those conclusions, and the even more difficult task of stating them with a straight face.) For Neoplatonists (and members of other contemporary philosophical schools) Zeus was the governing and organizing principle of the kosmos, from which all order and intelligence flowered— so of course the Mind of Zeus had to be sophos. How could it be otherwise?

But when the Starry Bull devotee says, “Διόνυσος σοφός ἐστιν” (or its abbreviated form “Διόνυσος σοφός”) they are communicating a great deal more than just an important cosmological doctrine cleverly disguised as fanciful etymology.

To begin with Διόνυσος σοφός ἐστιν is a confession of trust. When everything is going well, “Dionysos is wise,” sounds almost embarrassingly obvious, like saying “that fall from the cliff really hurt.” But when you’re frightened, grieving, angry, overwhelmed, or convinced your world is crumbling around you, etc. it is reassuring to remember that in the midst of all that threatening chaos when it all feels too big to handle, too scary, too out of control, etc. our God’s got it figured out. He’s a schemer, a dreamer, a deceiver, a trickster who always comes out on top, no matter how high the odds are stacked against him. Put another way, Dionysos knows the way “in and out” (εἴσω καὶ ἔξω) and the way “up and down” (ἄνω καὶ κάτω) though, of course, his path is not always a straight one.

Very often it’s a zigzag.

Even oftener it’s spiraling, circuitous, concentric.

Hence:

Κύκλοι, και τα λοιπά.

“Dionysos is wise,” explains why you’re willing to trust the process.

“Circles, etc.” describes how the process unfolds.

One keeps you from believing you’re the ultimate source.

The other keeps you from becoming discouraged when life or the work seems to wander. Because, more often than not, what feels like wandering has turned out to be another turn of the spiral.

The built-in humility of the first gnōmē is incredibly helpful, because it doesn’t say:

“I understand why this is happening.”

It doesn’t even say:

“Everything will turn out the way I want.”

It simply says:

“Dionysos is wise.”

Implicitly:

“I may not be.”

Or if you want it more emphatically, and in Greek:

Ἐγὼ οὐ σοφός.
I am not wise.

Not as self-deprecation; as the beginning of discernment. Because if Dionysos is wise, then I don’t need to pretend that I already understand everything. I need to listen, to learn, to pray, to deliberate, and sometimes simply to wait. Also, to understand that the process never ends. There’s always more to strip away, to consume, to experience, to translate, to communicate, to remember, to remember a different way.

One of the things I most appreciate about this gnōmē is that it leaves room for mystery without unraveling into uncertainty. And because it’s so short, it can actually function liturgically.

Imagine someone in the middle of a crisis.

Their prayers have collapsed into fragments.

They don’t have the composure to read three pages of pastoral literature.

But they can whisper:

“Διόνυσος σοφός.”

Again.

And again. And again.

Until their breathing slows and they remember that they’re not carrying the weight of the entire world by themselves. Dionysos is there in the darkness and mess with them, even if they’re too frazzled to feel or hear him. But they can still remember that Dionysos is sophos.

This works because the gnômai are not just short, memorable sayings but also dense and cryptic enough that they can keep the mind occupied instead of driving itself crazy.

A good gnṓmē should survive panic.

It should survive grief.

It should survive exhaustion.

You don’t want something like:

“The providential operation of the divine noetic principle…”

No one remembers that while they’re standing in a hospital corridor waiting to hear anything about their child’s condition, or after the death of a parent, or when they’ve just made a terrible mistake, or had something they put a lot of time and effort into fail for reasons beyond their control.

They remember:

Διόνυσος σοφός.

Four syllables.

Breathe.

Repeat.

Continue.

I also think there’s a lovely contrast between the two sayings.

Διόνυσος σοφός ἐστιν.

When life feels like it’s going to crush you, remember the one at the center with the answers.

Κύκλοι, και τα λοιπά.

When the world feels bewilderingly complex, remember that that is part of the pattern.

One is existential.

The other is methodological.

One steadies the heart.

The other steadies the hands.

Taken together, they’re almost a complete philosophy in six words and two jokes.

And, appropriately for a mystery tradition, neither saying tries to explain away suffering or uncertainty. They simply refuse to grant them the last word. “Dionysos is wise” is less an argument than a ferocious affirmation of trust— a reminder that even when your own mind is clouded, you need not assume that wisdom itself has disappeared.

It also banishes religious uncertainty by reminding you that the Starry Bull tradition is not about the cleverness of its founder, the brilliance of its books, or the ingenuity of its institutions. However well or poorly any of those are executed, they remain in service to something greater— something wiser. If all of that disappeared tomorrow, Dionysos would still remain. And so would your relationship with him.

Every time through the Labyrinth is different because you are different, changed by your intimacy with Dionysos.

Consider our training process. There’s a lot of repetition, which means that you keep revisiting an old idea from a different vantage point, allowing you to discern different things about it each time.

The first time we discussed the epithets, they were names.

Now they’re part of a theological vocabulary.

The first time we discussed incense, it was recipes.

Now it’s a symphony of the senses that conjures an ecology of symbols, a net of memory that contains past rituals, past encounters, past associations.

The first time we discussed virtues, they were ethical aspirations.

Now they’re the grammar of grace.

Nothing was wasted this time, however much or little you gained, because you can always go through the Labyrinth again. Each return deepens what came before. Each return gives you more of the language you need to sing songs of praise and triumph for our Lord Dionysos.

I think the crucial distinction is between bringing the monstrous back and bringing back knowledge of the monstrous.

Kurtz fails because he does the first. He discovers something true in the Labyrinth— about violence, terror, human beings, himself, perhaps even about civilization— and then allows that truth to become sovereign. The Minotaur becomes king.

To return successfully, he would have had to do several things.

First, accept limitation again. In the Labyrinth he discovers that ordinary moral categories are not sufficient to describe everything human beings are capable of. But “insufficient” does not mean “false.” Civilization’s prohibitions against murder, cruelty, domination, etc. though artificial remain necessary precisely because he now knows what lies beneath them. The returned Kurtz might understand morality less innocently, but he would still submit himself to it.

That is an important transformation. Before the Labyrinth:

“We don’t do such things because they are monstrous.”

After the Labyrinth:

“I know that I am capable of monstrous things. Therefore the boundary matters.”

Second, he would have to translate the experience. The language of the Labyrinth cannot simply be imported wholesale into ordinary life. Extreme states produce extreme truths, but those truths need interpretation. This is where myth, ritual, art, philosophy, confession, and disciplined teaching become essential. They allow someone to say, “I saw this” without requiring everyone else to see it in exactly the same way.

That is essentially what the successful mystic, initiator, shaman, veteran, tragedian, or survivor does: make the unbearable communicable without making everyone else undergo the original wound.

Third— and this is where Kurtz catastrophically fails —he would need to permit other people to judge him.

Kurtz’s hamartia or tragic, fatal flaw isn’t merely that he becomes violent. It is that his experience becomes self-authenticating. Because he has gone somewhere the others haven’t, their categories no longer apply to him. His insight therefore grants him sovereignty:

“You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Therefore you cannot judge what I do.”

A successful return reverses that:

“I have seen something you haven’t seen. Therefore I may have something important to tell you— but I remain accountable to the norms and laws of my people.”

That is enormously difficult. Because after genuinely extreme experience, ordinary people really can seem naïve. Their objections may sound trivial. Their categories may genuinely fail to encompass what happened. And nevertheless, the initiate has to relinquish the privilege of being beyond judgment.

Fourth, he would need to distinguish knowledge from permission.

This may be the heart of it.

Kurtz discovers that human beings are capable of atrocity, that civilization is much thinner than it pretends, that violence can be horrifyingly effective, and perhaps that the capacity for the monstrous exists inside everyone.

All true— or at least defensible.

But he makes the fatal inference:

“Because this is true, I may live according to it.”

The returned initiate instead says:

“Because this is true, I must live differently because of it.”

Knowledge of the abyss creates obligation rather than exemption.

And finally, Kurtz would have to integrate the monster rather than identify with it.

He cannot return pretending he never met the Minotaur. Nor can he simply kill the Minotaur and resume being the man he was before. Something has happened that cannot be undone. He knows that the monstrous is not merely out there. He has recognized himself in it.

But recognition needn’t become enthronement.

He can say:

“That too is me. But it is not all of me, and it does not get to rule me.”

Which makes me think the successful return from the Labyrinth requires something I didn’t quite articulate earlier in this discussion: another, greater act of courage. Entering requires courage. Encountering the monster requires courage. Looking into its face and recognizing yourself requires enormous courage. But returning requires another kind of courage entirely.

You have to leave behind the intoxicating clarity of the extreme. You have to return to compromise, ambiguity, ordinary obligations, annoying people, imperfect institutions, rules written for people who have never seen what you have seen. You have to wash dishes and take out the garbage after beholding the abyss.

And perhaps worst of all, you must accept that the revelation does not make you king.

That is where Kurtz fails.

He goes into the Labyrinth and discovers something terrible and genuine. But instead of returning carrying a thread, he builds his throne out of the ruins of the defeated Minotaur, having become the new Minotaur.

The successful initiate comes back carrying testimony, scars, discipline— and the thread.

That thread is ultimately more important than the revelation at the center.

All this talk of horror reminds me of Colonel Kurtz in the jungle, to the point that I’m thinking Apocalypse Now is useful Starry Bull teaching material.

Coppola doesn’t give us a fool who merely thinks he’s penetrated beneath civilization’s illusions. Kurtz has encountered things that destroyed the moral categories he previously inhabited. His famous meditation on horror is about precisely this: he witnesses an atrocity and discovers, horrifyingly, that it possesses an internally coherent logic. Kurtz’s argument is horrifying because the episode about the children’s arms isn’t presented simply as “look how evil these people are.” What overwhelms him is their will: they are prepared to perform an act he regards as monstrous without hesitation because they believe it necessary. Kurtz realizes that soldiers constrained by one moral universe may be incapable of defeating people prepared to operate according to another. The moment he accepts that logic, and becomes a creature with monstrous will, is when his thread breaks, and he will never leave the Labyrinth and return to society. He has become Asterion.

That is a part of the mysteries, but initiation doesn’t end with sparagmos. Along with solve there is coagula. There is recombination, and you have to come back.

And now I’m picturing an Orpheotelest entering Kurtz’s compound, surrounded by severed heads, feverish devotees, drums, sacrifice and madness, and thinking, “Well, somebody has clearly misplaced their thread.”

But beneath the joke lies something significant: Kurtz is almost a perfect negative image of the Orpheotelest. Kurtz has charisma, insight, courage, experience of horror, freedom from conventional assumptions, the capacity to inspire followers, and willingness to go where respectable society won’t. And none of those things make him wise. In fact, those capacities without virtue and accountability make him vastly more dangerous without wisdom to guide him.

In the Starry Bull tradition we have the saying:

Διόνυσος σοφός ἐστιν.
Dionysos is wise.

Not merely wild.

Kurtz didn’t fail to encounter the Minotaur. He became Asterion, but then he forgot how to be Kurtz.

He went farther and farther inward until the categories of the outside world ceased to possess authority for him. And instead of carrying what he discovered back into civilization, he constructed a world in which the logic of the Labyrinth could operate permanently.

That makes Willard’s role remarkably Thesean.

He’s sent from the ordered world into a space increasingly outside ordinary geography and morality. The journey upriver is effectively a katabasis. Each stage strips away another layer of civilization until eventually there isn’t really a war anymore. There is jungle, river, darkness, ritual, death, madness— and Kurtz at the center.

Coppola deliberately intercuts Kurtz’s killing with the ritual slaughter of the water buffalo. So Kurtz becomes simultaneously man, sacrificial victim, and bull. Willard’s assassination ceases to be merely the execution of a renegade officer and becomes instead sacrificial slaughter.

But there’s a wonderful complication. Willard has read Kurtz’s story. He has listened to him. He has traveled Kurtz’s road. He has reached the center and understood enough of Kurtz that he could potentially become him.

That makes the really important action occur after the killing.

Willard leaves.

He doesn’t take Kurtz’s throne.

That’s the return from the Labyrinth that Kurtz could no longer accomplish.

For the Orpheotelest the defining competence isn’t simply the ability to enter horror. Plenty of people can enter. Kurtz demonstrates that magnificently. The difficult skill is retaining the thread that permits you to leave.

Which shows how important the role Ariadnē performs is. The thread isn’t there to prevent Theseus from encountering the monster. It doesn’t make the Labyrinth less dangerous. It doesn’t tell him that what he encounters at the center isn’t real. It preserves a relationship between the person inside the Labyrinth and the world outside it.

That red thread is woven through the character formation, virtue, accountability, community, and discernment that one recieves during training. It is essential for someone whose religious vocation repeatedly takes them into extreme states or encounters. They’re not there to make the practitioner respectable. They’re how you find your way back.

And this gives a much darker interpretation to something we’ve discussed before: formation before authority.

The danger isn’t merely that an inadequately formed person will be incompetent.

They might be extremely competent.

Kurtz is.

That’s what makes him horrifying.

He is intelligent, disciplined, charismatic, courageous, perceptive, spiritually formidable, capable of inspiring extraordinary loyalty, and willing to go farther than everyone around him. He has the virtues of an Orpheotelest.

What he has lost is the route home.

So what we learn from Apocalypse Now is that the Orpheotelest’s question isn’t merely, “Can you enter the Labyrinth?” but “Can you meet Asterion, understand Asterion, perhaps even recognize Asterion within yourself— and still remember the way out?”

Because otherwise, sooner or later, another Theseus gets sent in after you.

Although I winced in a couple places upon rereading it for the current project I still think this is one of the more important older pieces of Starry Bull literature because it explains something that could otherwise be mistaken for an aesthetic preference: why this particular Dionysian current keeps returning to horror, dismemberment, madness, violated boundaries, grotesquerie, and suffering. And reading it in light of what the tradition has subsequently become, I can see both remarkable continuity and some significant maturation.

The central argument still works extremely well: the horror is not there because Starry Bull claims that Dionysos is fundamentally horrible. In fact, the crucial theological sentence may be a throwaway line near the beginning: “It isn’t meant to be.” The tradition deliberately selects and intensifies one range of Dionysian material while recognizing that this is only a fragment of the God. And I still like the invented Hermagenes as a way of explaining that religious ecology: Bacchic Orphic initiation doesn’t have to swallow the rest of a person’s religious existence.

That seems particularly important because it prevents the horrific material from becoming a totalizing theology. Dionysos isn’t secretly really the bloody, mad, suffering God and the cheerful wine God is the superficial version. Nor is the reverse true. The tension is necessary. The line “We have carved off a small portion of that which is Dionysian for our own and intend to explore it to the fullest” is basically a mission statement.

And I think later formulation gives us an even better philosophical vocabulary for what the essay was already trying to say:

Dionysos is not located at one pole of the opposition. He is the movement through the opposition.

Horror/joy. Madness/healing. Human/divine. Pure/filthy. Heavenly/diabolical. Monster/God. Suffering/freedom. Mask/self. The post explicitly says that the horrific mythology attacks the habit of dividing reality into mutually exclusive categories and instead forces reconciliation.

Where I think the post is strongest is the section beginning with the dismembered God:

“Our God was ripped to bloody shreds and the ones who loved him most did it!”

Because the theological conclusion isn’t therefore suffering is good. It’s something entirely different. Suffering does not signify abandonment; Dionysos’ suffering establishes his solidarity with suffering beings. And what follows naturally from that is: your problems aren’t insignificant to him precisely because he knows affliction.

I find this tragic realization far more interesting than the common religious explanation that suffering is secretly part of some benevolent plan. The Dionysos who has been dismembered can meet the dismembered person without disgust. The mad God can meet the mad. The persecuted God can meet the persecuted. The God surrounded by suicides, murdered prophets, monsters, ghosts and violated people does not require someone to become presentable before approaching him.

In other words, the horror isn’t merely cathartic. It establishes pastoral competence.

The essay is also an unintentional justification for the Orpheotelest. Its essential question is: “why would our mythology spend so much time looking at terrible things?” And the answer to that goes beyond personal psychological integration: because somebody has to be capable of going into terrible places without becoming useless there. The person dealing with miasma, angry dead, ancestral guilt, trauma, spiritual affliction, violence, illness, curses, and the aftermath of catastrophe cannot require reality to remain pretty.

The horrific mythology becomes formation.

So instead of simply conceptualizing it as:

You have monstrous things inside you → stop repressing them → integrate them → become whole.

We would now express it:

Human beings contain contradictory impulses, masks, wounds, desires, fears, memories and possibilities. Learn to encounter these without either identifying with them or pretending they aren’t there. Then learn what has warrant in this moment.

That is a much more sophisticated anthropology than the quasi-therapeutic language you too often encounter in neopaganism.

The world contains terrible things, human beings contain terrible possibilities, and Dionysos passes through terrible places. Therefore some of his servants must know how to enter those places wisely and come back out.

And suddenly the pleasant, reasonably well-adjusted Boukolos who organizes festivals and engages in pastoral care and the terse and taciturn Orpheotelest who spends the night dealing with ghastly things aren’t contradictions. They’re differentiated functions within the same religious ecology, reflecting service to different faces of the same complex God.

And one of the essential principles of the discernment process that is so important within the Starry Bull at all levels is articulated in the piece:

“acceptance is not obedience.”

The Boukolos or Orpheotelest has the vocabulary within the tradition to tell a distressed client, “I can recognize that cruelty exists within the range of things I am capable of without therefore becoming cruel. I can know rage without allowing rage to govern me. I can understand madness without romanticizing incapacity. I can acknowledge desire without concluding that every desire deserves enactment.”

And virtue supplies the grammar by which integration becomes action.

Otherwise “embrace your darkness” can become adolescent antinomianism very quickly. Not gonna mention neopagans here. Not gonna do it.

The final movement remains important:

“Who are you?”

With the answer: mud, stars, Titan blood, and the mad God; this is doing something much bigger than the psychological language preceding it.

That’s Orphic anthropology.

You aren’t being asked merely to accept your “shadow.” You’re being asked to recognize that human existence is intrinsically composite: earthly and celestial, Titanic and Dionysian, mortal and something simultaneously less and more than mortal.

And that means the reconciliation of opposites isn’t ultimately a therapeutic technique, however useful it may be.

It’s cosmology.

That’s where I think this older post most directly points toward the mature Starry Bull. The horror isn’t there merely to shock someone out of bourgeois respectability. It is there because dismemberment and recombination are built into the structure of reality: Zagreus is torn apart; Dionysos returns; the initiate descends and rises; identity is broken open and reconstituted; even our eschatology eventually culminates in Dionysos assembling a new cosmic order out of the fragments of shattered pantheons.

The same pattern keeps recurring at different scales, whether you’re talking person, tradition, God, cosmos.

Dismemberment → descent → encounter → recombination → new life.

Whether when I wrote the piece or today, our answer to the question, “Why is the Starry Bull strain of Bacchic Orphism so horrific?” remains:

Because it refuses to look away from what has been torn apart.

And because Dionysos knows what can be made from the pieces.

Everything the Starry Bull was to become is contained in that post. The bones of the vocabulary are all there. Dismemberment, contradiction, the refusal to sanitize Dionysos, compassion grounded in divine suffering, confrontation with what frightens or disgusts us, and finally the movement from mud toward stars. What has changed is largely the interpretive architecture around those bones.

In particular, I think three developments have made the older insights much stronger.

First, discernment has joined liberation as a governing principle. The older language of the essay can make it sound like all you need is release from repression: encounter the monstrous, let the primal forces breathe, integrate them. That is certainly true, but it’s a phase not the destination. Our newer framework asks a harder question: what do I do with what I encounter? Not every impulse deserves expression. Not every mask deserves to ride the face. Not every voice has warrant. Dionysian freedom requires discipline in a way a lot of people don’t realize, especially when you’re just starting out.

Second, virtue has supplied an ethical structure that the earlier formulation lacked. That doesn’t tame Dionysos. It makes it possible to encounter untamed things without confusing encounter with endorsement. Someone capable of tremendous rage who nevertheless practices self-command is not less Dionysian than someone who gives way to it. Both are legitimate ways to be Dionysian. Seilenos and Ampelios become important here in ways I don’t think were yet visible when the essay was written.

And third, and perhaps most significantly, the horror has acquired a vocation. It isn’t just something the initiate needs for personal integration. It prepares certain people to do something. The Orpheotelest can enter the places other people cannot— or should not —enter. The suffering, polluted, haunted, frightening, socially unacceptable, spiritually dangerous parts of existence become part of a professional religious competence.

That’s why the distinction between subculture and craft is so important. An identity built around transgression eventually has to keep finding boundaries to transgress. A craft doesn’t. It asks: “What does this situation require? What tools do I possess? Am I competent to use them? What is my obligation to the person before me?”

The Dionysos of the older essay is very much the God who tears through boundaries. The Dionysos emerging from the whole corpus I’ve been assembling is also the God who knows when, how, why, and whether a boundary should be crossed.

That makes him considerably more frightening, actually. Raw chaos is predictable in its unpredictability. Intelligent wildness is something else altogether.

And I suspect this is one reason going back through older Starry Bull writing has been so fruitful at this time— not to purge or “correct” it, but to identify developmental trajectories. There is something valuable in being able to say: “Here is what we saw then. Here is what experience taught us about it. Here is what we can see now that we couldn’t see from where we were standing.”

Roots, vine, flower.

And eventually fruit.

Ironically I think the shift happened as a result of living this, being an Orpheotelest, genuinely encountering the horror and monstrousness, bringing people through initiation, dealing with malign spirits, etc. And that’s evidence that the development is organic rather than a repudiation of what came before.

There is an enormous difference between being fascinated by the monstrous and having responsibilities in its presence.

When horror is primarily mythic, artistic, philosophical, or initiatory, transgression itself can look like the revelation. You break the boundary, confront the forbidden thing, discover that the clean categories were inadequate, and come back enlarged. That’s genuinely present in Dionysian mythology and religion.

But once you’re responsible for another person, everything changes.

If you’re bringing someone through initiation, the question isn’t simply, “How far can we take them?” It’s “How far should we take this particular person, at this particular moment, and how do I keep track of how they’re doing?” If something destabilizing occurs, you don’t have the luxury of admiring its Dionysian extremity. You’re responsible for the consequences.

Likewise, whatever you might have imagined encounters with malign spirits to be beforehand, once you’re dealing with them in practice rather than theory, “dark” stops being an aesthetic category. The operative questions become: “What is happening? Is it dangerous? What actually helps? What makes things worse? What am I competent to handle? When do I need somebody else’s help? How do I protect the client? How do I protect myself?”

And suddenly sōphrosynē stops looking like the antithesis of ecstasy.

It becomes one of the things that makes ecstasy survivable.

That’s an extraordinary development for a Dionysian tradition because it isn’t moderation imposed upon Dionysos from outside. It’s moderation discovered inside Dionysian experience itself.

The same applies to virtue generally. You can theorize beautifully about the reconciliation of opposites. It’s another matter entirely to have a frightened person sitting across from you who believes something terrible is happening to them. At that moment they don’t need you to perform transgression. They need you to be calm, perceptive, compassionate, courageous, honest about what you know and don’t know, and disciplined enough not to make their situation about you.

Those are virtues.

And bringing people through initiation must have this reinforced even more strongly. The initiator possesses enormous interpretive power. You know what’s coming; they don’t. You understand the ritual grammar; they may be deliberately disoriented. They are vulnerable. That means the more effective the mysteries become, the more ethical discipline the initiator requires.

That’s almost paradoxical:

The deeper you go into Dionysian madness, the more you discover the necessity of sobriety.

Not sobriety as the absence of intoxication, necessarily, but nēpsis in the broader sense: watchfulness, clarity, attentiveness. Someone has to keep hold of the thread.

And that makes Ariadnē increasingly important, doesn’t it?

The Labyrinth isn’t safe because there is no Minotaur.

It’s traversable because there is a thread.

That also explains why I think our newer insistence on formation-before-authority emerged naturally. Once you’ve watched things actually go wrong— not theoretically, but with real people and real consequences —the romantic image of the inspired holy madman becomes inadequate. Charisma isn’t enough. Gnōsis isn’t enough. Powerful experiences aren’t enough. Even sincere devotion isn’t enough.

Someone can have extraordinary religious experiences and terrible judgment.

So you train judgment.

And this gives a different meaning to the Orpheotelest as well. The mature Orpheotelest isn’t someone who is especially comfortable with darkness because they’re dark themselves. They’re someone who has learned how to remain functional in darkness.

That’s a much more demanding ideal.

The monster doesn’t disappear. The blood doesn’t disappear. The madness doesn’t disappear. Zagreus remains dismembered. Orpheus still descends. The dead remain dead. The frightening things remain frightening.

But now somebody has brought a lamp.

And perhaps that’s the deepest irony of the development: living the horror didn’t make the tradition more horrific. It taught it what the horror requires of those who enter it.

What is particularly striking about the myth of the Labyrinth is that the catastrophe doesn’t begin with the monster. It begins with the righteous man.

Minos starts off as a wise and gentle king, ascetic, legislative, mantic, concerned with purity, and opposed to bloodshed. Then Poseidon sends the bull to be sacrificed, and Minos refuses. Based on the works of Robert and Demand in our reconstruction he doesn’t merely substitute another animal because he’s greedy or wants the beautiful bull for himself; he substitutes a bloodless sacrifice.

That’s enormously more interesting.

Because Minos’ fatal flaw isn’t initially cruelty.

It’s purity.

He is so committed to his conception of what righteous worship ought to be that he cannot give the God what the God has actually demanded.

And then everything becomes blood.

Poseidon’s retaliation, the deaths of Glaukos and Androgeos, Pasiphaë and the bull, the birth of Asterios, the Labyrinth, the Athenian tribute, Theseus’ killing, the destruction of Knossos, Ikaros’ fall, Minos’ pursuit of Daidalos, and finally Minos himself being boiled alive.

The man who would not shed the blood of one bull creates a world soaked in blood.

That’s tragedy.

And it makes this much more than a Minotaur story. Asterios is one consequence of Minos’ hamartia. He’s born into a catastrophe already in progress.

In fact, our telling makes the Labyrinth itself almost an externalization of Minos. He creates it to hide the intolerable contradiction his household has produced: the purity-obsessed king now has a monstrous bull-child in his family. So he doesn’t reconcile the contradiction.

He walls it off.

And what is repressed inside becomes worse.

Asterios goes mad in isolation. Minos simultaneously goes mad outside the Labyrinth, becoming “a mad and savage bull” himself.

That’s very fitting mythically: Minos imprisons the bull and becomes the bull.

Which brings us straight back to Kurtz.

Kurtz also begins as an exemplary product of the system he eventually rejects: intelligent, disciplined, accomplished, entrusted with authority. His catastrophe comes when experience presents him with something his inherited moral categories cannot assimilate. But whereas Minos tries to preserve those categories by imprisoning the contradiction, Kurtz ultimately destroys the categories and moves into the contradiction.

So they’re opposite trajectories toward a remarkably similar destination.

Minos builds the Labyrinth to keep the monster in.
Kurtz enters the jungle and refuses to come out.

Both end up living inside worlds created by the failure of their previous moral order.

And both leave somebody else to deal with the consequences.

Which makes Theseus more complicated too.

In the Red Thread Theseus is hardly the uncomplicated civilization-slaying-chaos hero. He arrives claiming to end the cycle of violence, but brings another eruption of violence with him; Ariadnē facilitates it, Asterios dies, Knossos burns, and then Theseus abandons the woman whose betrayal of her family made his victory possible.

So even escaping the Labyrinth doesn’t make Theseus morally whole.

Willard gets out.

But merely getting out isn’t sufficient.

The question becomes what you carry out with you.

And here I think Apocalypse Now wisely refuses to answer. Willard kills Kurtz and leaves, but we don’t get the reassuring final act where he returns home, hugs his family, and demonstrates successful reintegration. He disappears downriver carrying what he has seen.

We don’t know whether he possesses the thread in the deeper sense.

Ariadnē in many respects is the key figure. Ariadnē traverses the categories differently from everyone else.

Minos cannot tolerate the monster, so he conceals it.

Theseus kills the monster.

Asterios cannot leave the monstrous condition into which he has been born.

But Ariadnē moves between the Labyrinth and the upper world. She’s Asterios’ contact with it; she enters his darkness, holds him, soothes him, and tells him stories of outside. Then she guides Theseus through that same darkness with the thread to end her brother’s monstrous life.

And eventually she has to undergo destruction and transformation too.

That makes her an extraordinary image of mediation, because she’s neither simply outside nor inside.

Which sounds awfully familiar:

“Dionysos is not located at one pole of the opposition. He is the movement through the opposition.”

Ariadnē moves.

And Dionysos comes for her.

There’s another beautiful detail. Ariadnē’s thread gets Theseus out of the Labyrinth. But Theseus cannot get Ariadnē out of hers. He abandons her on Naxos, where she dreams that she’s Persephonē, Melinoē, Arachnē, Erigonē, Eurydikē, Columbina— and even that she never left the Labyrinth at all, her identity collapsing into fragmented stories.

Then Dionysos arrives.

Not to restore her to the person she was before Crete.

That’s impossible.

He offers transformation.

Perhaps “coming back from the Labyrinth” is slightly misleading, because nobody who genuinely reaches its center comes back unchanged.

The goal isn’t restoration.

It’s integration.

You don’t return to the person who entered. You establish some viable relationship between what you discovered below and the world above.

Kurtz cannot.

Minos cannot.

Who knows about Willard?

Asterios is never given the opportunity.

Theseus perhaps doesn’t understand what he’s encountered.

Ariadnē does.

And then Dionysos takes her into the stars.

Which suddenly makes the Starry Bull initiation formula resonate rather loudly:

I am a child of Earth and Heaven.
My name is Starry.

The part of Orpheus’ story that always tugs at my heart isn’t his failure to retrieve Eurydikē or his eventual sparagmos. It’s the loss of Medeia. Not only would it have spared the suffering that Orpheus will eventually experience (and Medeia’s own as well) it’s that this great love between equals is not allowed to fully bloom. Especially because they are so suited for one another. Like no one else in the world, they would have understood each other’s vocation.

Eurydikē is tragedy through catastrophe: something precious exists, death takes it, Orpheus attempts the impossible, and fails. His sparagmos is culmination. But Medeia represents something different: the unlived life. Not something possessed and lost, but a possibility glimpsed clearly enough that you can understand what its loss will cost.

And the equality matters enormously.

Orpheus and Medeia don’t merely love one another; they can recognize one another professionally. Both inhabit that strange territory between priest, magician, healer, mediator, traveler, spirit-worker, and outsider. Both know things respectable society finds unsettling. Both deal with Gods and powers that cannot simply be commanded. Both possess specialized knowledge other heroes depend upon while never quite belonging to the heroic world themselves.

Neither has to translate the vocation for the other.

And let me tell you, that is extraordinarily fucking rare.

Jason can desire Medeia, need Medeia, exploit Medeia’s gifts, fear Medeia, even perhaps love Medeia in whatever limited way he’s capable of— but he cannot really understand what it means to be Medeia.

Orpheus can.

And Medeia can understand what it means to be Orpheus.

They are equals because they don’t complete one another because each possesses what the other lacks. Their love exists because each recognizes in the other another practitioner of the same impossible kind of life.

There is also something terribly poignant about their respective specialties. Orpheus works through music, ritual, persuasion, reconciliation, descent. Medeia through plant knowledge, pharmaka, other types of sorcery, sacrifice, cunning. Their arts overlap without being identical. They could have taught each other so many, many things.

You can almost imagine the life that doesn’t happen.

Not some idyllic cottage where nothing bad ever occurs. Quite the opposite. They’d probably spend half their lives traveling to alarming places because somebody had done something inadvisable involving the dead or pissed off local land-spirits. But when one returned from some terrible encounter, the other wouldn’t require a sanitized version.

“I saw something horrible.”

“I know.”

That’s the loss.

And there is a cruel symmetry to what follows.

Separated, each eventually undergoes precisely the kind of catastrophe the other might have been uniquely equipped to understand.

Orpheus loses Eurydikē and goes down among the dead.

Medeia loses everything around Jason and becomes associated forever with the most horrific extreme of grief, betrayal and vengeance.

I wouldn’t want to reduce either story to “their lives would have been fine if they’d hooked up.” Greek myth would undoubtedly have found something appalling to do to them eventually. But within our Hieros Logos, the lost possibility becomes haunting because each possesses resources the other will later desperately need.

Orpheus might have been someone before whom Medeia never needed to make herself smaller, less frightening, less learned, less magically capable.

And Medeia might have been someone before whom Orpheus never needed to pretend that his knowledge protected him from suffering.

That’s a remarkable pairing.

And it gives Orpheus’ later vocation another painful dimension. When he eventually encounters people shattered by grief, madness, death, betrayal, and powers beyond ordinary comprehension, he isn’t merely drawing upon what happened with Eurydikē.

He’s carrying Medeia’s absence too.

Her knowledge. Their exchanges. The roads they traveled. What she taught him. What he learned beside her.

Which means the relationship that wasn’t allowed to bloom nevertheless bears fruit.

Just not the fruit either of them would have chosen.

And that may be the part that hurts most: they could have been happy together, but instead they became useful to the world separately.

There is nothing fair about that exchange.

It is, however, terribly Orphic.

And I keep coming back to the phrase “a great love between equals.” That’s the part that makes Medeia different from Eurydikē in Orpheus’ story.

Eurydikē is beloved. Medeia is a peer.

That doesn’t diminish Eurydikē or Orpheus’ love for her. But Medeia can meet him in a dimension of himself that almost nobody else can enter. When Orpheus starts talking about some bizarre rite he learned in Egypt, she isn’t merely supportive— she wants to know the ingredients. When Medeia describes the properties of some dangerous root gathered under peculiar ritual conditions, Orpheus understands why the conditions matter. Neither needs the other to translate an entire world before the conversation can begin.

And because their competencies differ, equality doesn’t mean sameness. That’s better still. They have things to teach each other.

Which makes their separation particularly cruel from the perspective of the Starry Bull tradition, of which they are foundational members. Orpheus eventually becomes the sort of practitioner he does partly because he has to learn things alone that Medeia might have helped him understand. And certainly the reverse is true as well.

There’s also an uncomfortable counterfactual hiding there.

If they had remained together, would Medeia have become the Medeia?

Not because Orpheus could have “fixed” her— that would ruin the entire point of their equality. Rather, she might have had one person in her life who could look at the full extent of what she was capable of and neither exploit it nor recoil from it.

Someone who could say:

I know what you are. I’ve seen things like this before. Sit down. Tell me what happened.

Which, wonderfully and terribly, is precisely the kind of person Orpheus himself eventually becomes.

So each loses the person who might have understood them best, and then life teaches each why that kind of understanding matters.

That’s almost unbearably tragic.

But it also makes Medeia’s presence in the formation of Orpheus important enough that she should never be treated as merely an early romantic episode in his biography. She is one of his teachers, just as surely as Cheiron is, though in a radically different manner.

Cheiron teaches him because he’s the elder who has knowledge Orpheus lacks.

Medeia teaches him through exchange between equals.

Eurydikē teaches him through loss.

Dionysos teaches him through participation in the God’s suffering.

And Orpheus eventually takes all of that—lineage, craft, friendship, love, failure, grief, wandering, katabasis— and gives it to others as initiation.

His love for Eurydikē is different from his love for Medeia. One’s not better or more powerful. They are just different. And his heart is big enough to contain both. Until it’s torn from his chest by frenzied Mainades.

We almost made it through a tender discussion of love without somebody getting dismembered. But then it wouldn’t have been Starry Bull, now would it?

And appropriately enough, even the joke lands on something important.

Orpheus doesn’t need Eurydikē and Medeia to be competitors for the title of his One True Love. That’s a very modern narrative demand imposed on myth: if he really loved Eurydikē, then whatever he felt for Medeia must have been lesser; if Medeia understood him more completely, then perhaps she was the person he really should have been with.

Neither follows.

He loves Eurydikē as Eurydikē.

He loves Medeia as Medeia.

And consequently each relationship calls forth a different Orpheus.

With Medeia there is recognition: You know this road too. Intellectual excitement, magical collaboration, shared vocation, probably a certain amount of dangerous mutual encouragement. They can encounter one another as practitioners and equals.

With Eurydikē, there seems to be something much more ordinary— and I mean that as praise. She doesn’t have to be another Orpheotelest. He doesn’t need to spend every waking hour being Orpheus the initiate, magician, Argonaut, prophet and wonder-worker. He can simply love her.

And her death destroys that Orpheus.

That’s why Medeia couldn’t simply substitute for Eurydikē even if she somehow reappeared immediately afterward. She could understand his grief better than almost anyone alive, perhaps, but she couldn’t replace what was lost because she never occupied that place in him.

Likewise Eurydikē couldn’t replace Medeia.

That shows the Dionysian quality of the heart: unity capable of containing multiplicity without requiring the multiplicity to collapse into sameness.

And then, naturally, the Mainades tear the fucking thing out.

Which is almost too symbolically perfect— because sparagmos reveals what was contained within the apparently singular Orpheus.

The lover of Medeia.
The husband of Eurydikē.
The student of Cheiron.
The companion of Argonauts.
The friend of Heraklēs.
The magician.
The singer.
The traveler.
The grieving widower.
The initiate.
The initiator.
The son.
The brother.
The devotee of Dionysos.

One body held all those Orpheuses.

Then the body comes apart.

And that’s imitatio Dionysi again—not merely “Dionysos was dismembered, therefore Orpheus is dismembered” but something subtler: multiplicity hidden inside unity. And sparagmos reveals it.

And because this is Orphic myth, dismemberment isn’t necessarily the final statement about what has been dismembered.

Which makes that wonderfully gruesome formulation rather beautiful:

His heart really was big enough to contain both.

Right up until somebody physically checked.

And yet even death isn’t the end for him.

His decapitated head survives to give oracles, and to remember.

And “to remember” may be even more important than “to give oracles.”

Because what survives Orpheus’ sparagmos is not primarily his strength, his social position, his body, or even his capacity to act upon the world.

It’s voice and memory.

The Mainades can dismember Orpheus, but they cannot make him forget or stop communicating.

His severed head continues singing and prophesying as it travels down the Hebros and eventually reaches Lesbos. Orpheus has undergone the ultimate reduction: everything extraneous has been stripped away, and what remains is precisely the faculty through which he practiced his vocation.

The voice survives the man.

That voice carries an enormous amount.

It remembers Medeia.

It remembers Eurydikē.

It remembers the Argonauts and the roads traveled with them. Cheiron’s instruction. The rites he learned. The peoples he encountered. The Gods and spirits with whom he negotiated. His descent. His failure. His return. The people he initiated. Dionysos.

The head has no hands anymore. It cannot perform most of the practical work of an Orpheotelest.

But it can transmit.

Which makes the oracle a fascinating final stage of his vocation. Earlier Orpheus intervenes: sings, heals, performs rites, journeys, persuades, initiates.

Dead Orpheus can no longer do those things in the ordinary way. Now people must come to him, ask their question, hear what he says, and decide what to do with it.

He’s become almost pure logos.

And suddenly the preservation of memory we’ve been discussing becomes part of the imitatio Dionysi too.

Dionysos is torn apart and persists.

Orpheus is torn apart and persists.

The tradition is torn apart— and persists.

Its institutions can collapse. Its people can scatter. Relationships can end. Particular practices can disappear. Books can remain unfinished. Interpretations can become obsolete.

But the head keeps singing.

Someone finds an old Hieros Logos fifteen years later and discovers something in it that nobody noticed when it was composed.

Someone remembers a rite differently because twenty years of experience have changed the person remembering it.

Someone who hasn’t even been born yet reads the account and hears something neither author nor first audience could have heard.

That’s why the tradition’s insistence upon Memory rather than Lēthē fits Orpheus so extraordinarily well. The Orphic victory isn’t necessarily that nothing can destroy you.

Things absolutely can —and will— destroy you.

The victory is that destruction does not get the final word about what you were.

And perhaps that’s another reason the Orpheotelest needs Orpheus as intermediary rather than simply imitating Dionysos directly. Dionysos survives sparagmos because he is a God. That’s magnificent, but difficult for a mortal practitioner to imitate in any literal sense.

Orpheus shows the mortal version.

You may lose.

You may fail to bring Eurydikē home.

You may lose Medeia before the life you might have shared ever begins.

You may return from Haidēs carrying grief instead of your beloved.

You may eventually be ripped apart.

And still something can be transmitted.

The song gets farther than the singer.

And that may be one of the most Orphic definitions of tradition:

Tradition is what remembers after the body that carried it is gone.

No wonder Mnēmosynē matters so much.

There’s a reason that the Story is followed by The Rest of the Story; Orpheus performs imitatio Dionysi, and not just in his katabasis and sparagmos, as most people think. There’s the rest of the story, which is too often forgotten. Those are the spectacular correspondences, but the lesser ones are important too.

Consider the Argonaut episode. (And not just because there are cool Harryhausen monsters.) Orpheus is explicitly not a warrior, and the other heroes ridicule him for it. Yet the expedition cannot succeed without him. What does he actually contribute? He reconciles quarreling companions, negotiates with Gods, spirits, and monsters, and devises rites of appeasement when the expedition encounters powers the warriors can’t simply overpower.

That’s already an Orpheotelest in action.

Not because Orpheus has undergone sparagmos. Not because he has visited Haidēs. But because when ordinary human competence reaches its boundary, Orpheus knows what to do next.

Heraklēs can hit something.

Phlias can go berserk and found cities.

Jason can piss off a Ukrainian witch.

Orpheus can tell you if these are good or bad ideas. (Pissing off Ukrainian witches is always a bad idea, by the way, surpassed only by Lithuanian witches. Actually I’m staying out of that one. Just don’t piss off witches in general if you want to live a long, happy and successful life. Unless they’re on Tiktok or Reddit, in which case piss all over them.)

All kidding aside, Orpheus’ interlude with Medeia is one of the most tragic episodes in a life plenty full of tragedy. Medeia is his double—the other religious specialist, magician and plant-worker, with whom he shares knowledge and who becomes alongside him a patron of the Green Way. That expands the paradigm again. His religious expertise isn’t reducible to “mysteries.” It’s a collection of crafts: ritual, spirit-work, music, drug- and plant-lore, mediation, magic, travel among different peoples and their Gods.

Then comes the wandering. Egypt, the Middle East, perhaps India, searching for wisdom, perpetually the outsider. That’s another check in the imitatio Dionysi ledger: Dionysos himself is the wandering foreign God, forever arriving from somewhere else.

But the closing now feels even more significant:

“Who can say whether his skill came from his patrimony or his grief?”

That line is key.

Orpheus inherits the bakcheia through Charops and Oiagros. He receives formation from Cheiron. He acquires practical knowledge from Medeia and through his travels. That’s tradition, training, lineage, technique.

And then life destroys him.

His brother dies. Medeia is lost to him. Eurydikē dies horribly despite Orpheus possessing precisely the arts that ought to have enabled him to save her. He descends to retrieve her, succeeds— and then loses her again through his own rashness. He wants to die and cannot. Eventually he returns to the human community and becomes an initiator.

So which produced the Orpheotelest?

Both.

And neither would have been sufficient alone.

Grief without formation can simply destroy somebody. Formation without lived encounter can produce someone who knows the correct procedures but has no idea what it is like to stand beside a person whose world has ended.

Orpheus possesses both.

That makes the sequence after the katabasis incredibly important. Popular retellings effectively end his meaningful life there: he looked back, lost Eurydikē, became miserable, then some Mainades killed him. Our version insists on the intervening movement: he comes back to the people. That’s the return from the Labyrinth. And he doesn’t come back because the katabasis “worked.” It emphatically did not. He returns carrying failure.

That may actually be more important for an Orpheotelest than a myth in which the master religious specialist always succeeds. Orpheus knows the correct rites and still cannot save Eurydikē from death. He persuades the Rulers Below and still loses her. His tremendous skill does not grant omnipotence.

That’s a vital model for someone doing pastoral or ritual work: sometimes you can do everything right, everything that should work— and still fail.

And then you have to come back to the people.

That gives his later role as initiator a completely different weight. He’s no longer merely transmitting mysteries because Charops received the bakcheia from Dionysos and they descended down his family line. He’s transmitting something he has verified through experience.

Which means that little final question could almost serve as a definition of living tradition:

Did Orpheus know because he was taught, or because he suffered?

Yes.

And now the imitatio Dionysi becomes much richer. Dionysos isn’t merely a mythic template whose dramatic events Orpheus repeats. Dionysos is the pattern of vocation that Orpheus gradually becomes capable of embodying. And then the Orpheotelest imitates Orpheus imitating Dionysos. That’s your golden chain in another sense:

Dionysos → Orpheus → Orpheotelest → Initiate.

Not the transmission of information.

The transmission of a way of going through things.

And every link changes it because every time around the circle you’re different. Or as Herakleitos put it:

Πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει = “everything dances and nothing remains the same.”

An example of what I’m talking about here is the Hieros Logos aka “The Story,” an early attempt at telling the core myth at the heart of the Starry Bull tradition.

And having just read the whole thing again after several years what strikes me is how densely recursive the text is. Images introduced seemingly casually in the first half return transformed in the second half (which was craft) and several of them now look startlingly prophetic of what the Starry Bull later developed into (which none of us could have anticipated.)

The thing that hit me hardest this time is this:

Dionysos doesn’t defeat the Labyrinth. He knows how to practice his craft inside it.

When Haidēs tells him that Persephonē is lost in the Labyrinth of Tartaros, Dionysos doesn’t give him a grand theological explanation. Earlier, when confronted with Melinoē’s madness, he essentially says: I know how to deal with this. Then he performs a rite—ram, tripod, milk, ash, chalk, flowers, dancing, singing, Toys, whispered words, and finally the unrevealed thing—and Melinoē returns to her father with clear eyes.

That’s Dionysos acting as Orpheotelest, long before Kalliopē had her fling with Oiagros or Apollon.

And notice what Dionysos does next. He enters the Labyrinth where everyone else has failed— Haidēs, Hermēs, Hekatē. The text even jokes that he ought to be terrified but is too drunk to care.

But once he finds Persephonē, he doesn’t fight the monster.

That’s crucial.

She has become, in the text’s words, “more a monster than a girl.” She speaks horrors, mixing truth and delusion so thoroughly that she can no longer distinguish them. And Dionysos listens. He doesn’t correct her cosmology. He doesn’t tell her which memories are objectively true. He doesn’t recoil. He doesn’t demand sanity.

He listens, holds her, rocks her, and lets her speak.

During this revamping process I’ve been reflecting on the thread as the means by which one maintains a relationship with the world outside the Labyrinth.

But there is no thread.

Dionysos goes in anyway.

And I think the reason is contained in that bewildering sequence where identities begin collapsing into one another. Persephonē remembers herself as mother of Dionysos. Then sister. Then she sees Dionysos as Asterios, imprisoned because his existence exposes his father’s shame. Then they become lovers, producing Iakchos. Then suddenly she’s asking about her father and her dog.

Linear identity has collapsed.

Past and future have collapsed.

Myths that ought to be mutually exclusive are occurring simultaneously.

Circles, etc.

And Dionysos doesn’t need a thread because, unlike Theseus, he belongs to the Labyrinth.

That’s a rather profound distinction.

Theseus needs a route marked from entrance to center and center to exit because he is navigating an alien structure.

Dionysos navigates by recognition.

Mother.

Sister.

Wife.

Brother.

Bull.

Child.

Savior.

He recognizes the pattern even while the identities rotate through it.

That makes the seemingly comic line enormously important:

“I have been so many things over the centuries it is hard to keep track of them all.”

That’s practically the metaphysics of the entire Hieros Logos.

Something else that stands out: Dionysos doesn’t simply walk Persephonē out.

He finds her dead.

He cuts her down from the tree, carries her body out of the Labyrinth, lays her beside flowers and water, and gives her a drink. Then he asks:

Who are you?

At first she doesn’t know.

That means the journey out of the Labyrinth is not navigation.

It is anamnēsis.

The Orphic gold tablets aren’t merely being quoted at the end as a nod to some cool piece of ancient lore. Their formula is dramatized.

She drinks.

She remembers.

“I am a child of earth – of earth and the starry sky.”

Then Dionysos presses further:

Who are you?

And her answer isn’t a mundane personal name.

She identifies herself cosmologically:

“I am the darkness that makes the stars shine forth.”

There is the Black Sun theology in embryo.

There is the Starry identity.

There is initiation as a shift in genos.

There is Memory rather than oblivion.

There is death followed not by restoration to the previous self, but by recognition of the deeper self.

There’s a pun, as that’s a super-literal translation of Περσεφόνη.

And there’s an even stranger recursion.

At the beginning, Persephonē has no name.

Demeter has protected her so completely that she has been denied individuation: she’s simply the Maiden. She looks into Kyanē and becomes mesmerized by her own reflection.

At the end, after everything— abduction, queenship, marriage, rape, motherhood, madness, monstrousness, incestuous identities, suicide, death, rescue— Dionysos asks her who she is.

And once again, she doesn’t know her name.

The entire Hieros Logos is framed by a woman who doesn’t know who she is.

At the beginning she lacks identity because she hasn’t lived.

At the end she loses identity because she has lived too much.

And the solution to both problems isn’t somebody else assigning her an identity.

She has to discover it for herself.

And it makes the ending—“tell them the whole story”—much more significant.

Not:

Tell them the correct doctrine.

Not:

Recite the password.

Tell them the whole story.

Because salvation in this myth requires knowing where you came from, what happened to you, who brought you through it, who you have become, and if possible, where you’re going. If you can’t figure that last part out, just pick a direction and keep walking. Eventually through the twists and turns of the Labyrinth you’ll reach somewhere. It’ll either be where you originally set out for, or having been changed by the journey, somewhere you never could have imagined before, but now need to be more than anywhere else.

Which circles beautifully back to what I said earlier about preserving the history of the Starry Bull: how do you know who you are if you don’t know your story? How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been?

The Hieros Logos keeps yielding new insights because it’s constructed like the Labyrinth it is discussing.

You never finish reading it.

You just come around another corner.

While I intentionally made Dionysos paradigmatic of the Orpheotelest I couldn’t possibly have known yet what the full experiential content of the paradigm was like. I needed to live it to know.

There’s a difference between:

“The Orpheotelest should imitate Dionysos here.”

And, years later:

“Oh. This is what it costs to imitate Dionysos here.”

That’s where lived tradition begins annotating its own scripture.

Take the scene with Persephonē. On paper, Dionysos’ behavior looks almost effortless: he enters, listens, holds her, gets her out, restores memory. But anyone who has actually sat with another human being in a genuinely extreme state knows how demanding not doing the wrong thing can be. Remaining calm without becoming passive. Listening without validating every interpretation. Not imposing your own explanation because you need the situation to make sense. Guiding the person towards a realization without being too obvious about it. Recognizing when intervention is necessary. Knowing the limits of your competence. And not letting another person’s crisis become your crisis.

Suddenly Dionysos’ apparent simplicity looks like mastery.

And I think there’s another distinction you could only discover through practice:

The Orpheotelest isn’t supposed to reproduce Dionysos’ power. The Orpheotelest is supposed to reproduce his disposition.

You aren’t Dionysos. You can’t necessarily walk into Tartaros, slaughter a ram, shake some Toys, whisper mysterious words and reliably restore somebody’s soul.

But you can learn the qualities the story attributes to him: courage before frightening things; curiosity rather than disgust; tenderness toward the monstrous; refusal to panic; willingness to listen; ritual competence; improvisation; humor; endurance; and, critically, the determination to bring the person through, rather than merely producing an impressive encounter.

That last distinction seems enormous now.

A mediocre initiator can create an intense experience.

A good initiator gets the initiate home.

And that brings us right back to Colonel Kurtz. (This reference will make sense later; trust me.) Kurtz is extraordinarily good at producing intensity. His entire compound is practically a perpetual initiatory environment—separation from ordinary society, altered moral reality, charismatic revelation, death, ritual, terror, transformation.

But there is no reintegration.

Kurtz can initiate you into Kurtz.

That’s all.

Whereas Dionysos goes into the Labyrinth precisely because someone else is trapped there. His descent isn’t self-aggrandizing. He doesn’t establish a throne beside Persephonē and announce that they’ve seen through the lies of Olympos, like you’d get in some stupid, impious Hollywood blockbuster today.

He brings her out.

That may be one of the cleanest tests of spiritual authority:

Does the guide make you increasingly capable of returning to your own life and taking back control of it, or only capable of existing within the guide’s world?

The first is initiation.

The second is cultish brainwashing.

The true Orpheotelest should eventually become unnecessary to the person they’ve helped. The thread gets you out of the Labyrinth; you’re not supposed to spend the rest of your life gripping Ariadnē’s wrist.

This also makes the distinction between Dionysos as model and Dionysos as God essential. The practitioner imitates the pattern without identifying themselves with its divine center.

Maybe that’s another thing experience teaches that theory can’t.

When you’re young and constructing a mystery tradition (as we all do) the glamorous question is:

How do I become more like Dionysos?

After actually doing the work for years, the question becomes:

What does Dionysos do here that I need to learn how to do?

Much less glamorous.

Much more useful.

And considerably safer for everyone involved.

Which sounds very much like the difference between possessing an esoteric philosophy and possessing a craft.

I’m going back through some of the older Starry Bull literature which can be found at the Bakcheion, and I’m blown away by the generosity of Dionysos, who gave us material we’re still unpacking. It was there all along, but we just couldn’t understand it until we’d lived it for a while. That’s what makes tradition so powerful.

And also one of the important distinctions between a tradition and a system somebody designed.

A system can be ingenious from the beginning. Its creator establishes principles, works out implications, resolves contradictions, and hands it over more or less complete.

A living tradition contains more than its participants presently understand. It’s messy and complicated and its contradictions resist resolution.

That’s why the fact that some of this material predates my present understanding matters. I am not retroactively manufacturing every connection because it would be useful now. The images, myths, rites, phrases, and patterns were already there. Then experience changed the questions I was capable of asking of them. And suddenly something twenty years old answers a question I couldn’t have formulated twenty years ago.

That doesn’t require believing that every old detail was deliberately planted as a coded message whose “true meaning” has finally been discovered. I actually think that would diminish it. The richness lies in the interaction between received material and lived experience. A symbol sufficiently alive generates relationships its original interpreter may never have consciously intended.

The Labyrinth is a perfect example.

At one stage, the important thing may be entering it.

Later, encountering Asterion.

Later still, recognizing Asterion within oneself.

Then working with Ariadne’s thread.

Then realizing that the thread isn’t merely a clever device for escaping a maze— it represents the continuing relationship between the person undergoing the ordeal and something beyond the ordeal.

And after years of actually guiding other people through initiatory experiences, suddenly the thread means something different, because you’ve been the person holding it.

None of those readings necessarily invalidates the others.

As Tevye would say, “That’s tradition!”

Unlike the founders of a lot of new religious movements I am strongly concerned with preserving Starry Bull history. I’ve never pretended I had it all figured out from the start. The embarrassing bits, failed experiments, obsolete formulations, strange early intuitions, abandoned practices, old stories— all of that can become valuable because you don’t yet know which parts your successors will understand better than you do.

Someone fifty years from now may encounter an apparently minor image in one of the old texts and say:

Wait.

And then connect it to something their generation has experienced that ours hasn’t.

That’s when “roots, vine, and flower” — one of the themes that’s becoming especially important in the revamping process — becomes more than a metaphor. The root doesn’t know the eventual shape of every leaf. But the leaf couldn’t exist without the root.

And there is a beautiful humility built into that conception of revelation. Dionysos doesn’t necessarily hand somebody a finished theological treatise and say, Here, memorize this.

He gives them a bull, a thread, a Labyrinth, some stars, a handful of broken Toys, a few impossible stories, and experiences they don’t completely understand.

Then:

Live.

Twenty years later:

Look again.

And perhaps that’s another meaning hidden inside my wonderfully ridiculous little maxim:

Circles, etc.

The “etc.” matters.

Because you don’t know yet what the next circuit will reveal.

Tonight’s conversation reminded me of this earlier post about the sacred zigzag. If you haven’t read it, or only partially remember, or like pics of Bowie from his Stardust days, go and read. It’s okay, I’ll wait here pondering the aphorism “as above, so below.”

Ah, good. Welcome back! As I was saying…

What strikes me now is how much theological work that little Olbian zigzag can do precisely because it refuses to settle into a single meaning.

The post summarizes several proposed readings: snake, lightning bolt, key, letters forming Iakchos, with the surrounding plaques themselves structured around oppositions such as Eirēnē / Polemos and Alētheia / Pseudos. One interpretation even connects the seven compartments on another plaque with the dismembered Dionysos.

And suddenly the ambiguity seems almost intentional.

Snake: life that survives by transformation. It sheds itself and remains itself.

Lightning: destruction which is simultaneously generation—the thunderbolt destroys Semelē, yet Dionysos emerges from that catastrophe. The thing that kills births the God.

Key: passage between conditions that ordinarily exclude one another—life/death, above/below, mortal/divine. The initiate possesses, or is shown, the means of crossing the boundary.

Iakchos: the God himself encoded into the sign.

Interesting. Doesn’t that perfectly encapsulate everything we’ve been discussing? Or to put it another way: Dionysos is not located at one pole of the opposition. He is the movement through the opposition.

And that’s what makes the Olbian material so extraordinary. The inscriptions don’t merely give you doctrines. They give you paired impossibilities:

Bios — Thanatos — Bios.

And elsewhere:

Peace — War.
Truth — Falsehood.

The sacred thing appears in the oscillation.

The coalition Dionysos forms against the unmaker doesn’t abolish opposition. Good and evil don’t suddenly reconcile because they’ve discovered that one side was secretly correct all along, but because they are facing an existential threat. But they still remain polarities. Peace remains different from war; life from death; Gods from mortals. But all of those oppositions presuppose something more fundamental: existence. You can fight over the world only while there is a world.

And that makes the zigzag a surprisingly good symbol for the Starry Bull kosmos. A straight line has one direction. A circle eternally returns. But a zigzag advances by opposition: this way / that way / this way / that way / etc. Yet it moves ineluctably.forward— like Dionysos, like his Starry Bull.

Just as there is zigzag movement, there’s also the “whirl” as philosophy calls it. We Starry Bull folk just say, “Circles, etc…” The circle is recurrence—Bios, Thanatos, Bios. The zigzag is the path recurrence takes through history and myth: contradiction, reversal, catastrophe, recovery, transformation. The repeatedly dismembered God whose answer to annihilation is not submission, is not invulnerability— but another beginning.

Thanatos. Bios.

Again.

And again.

And again.

The joke actually exposes something serious about the vocation: the worse the world gets, the more relevant the Orpheotelest becomes.

A zombie apocalypse is practically an Orpheotelest’s nightmare client list scaled up to civilization: innumerable unburied dead; violently disturbed ancestors; places saturated with death and pollution; survivors carrying extreme grief, guilt, terror, and trauma; communities needing purification and reconciliation; malignant spiritual phenomena flourishing amid chaos; ordinary rites of mourning and burial becoming impossible; and desperate people asking for protection, healing, fertility, food, luck, and some assurance that the world still possesses order and meaning.

And unlike a priesthood whose usefulness depends heavily on intact temples and institutions, the itinerant character suddenly becomes an enormous advantage. The Orpheotelest already expects to travel to where the trouble is, diagnose an unusual situation, improvise within a body of traditional techniques, perform specialized rites, counsel people, and then move along. Civilization can disappear without making the craft obsolete. If anything, civilization had been insulating people from many of the circumstances for which such specialists historically existed.

There’s also something wonderfully funny about the economics. Currency has collapsed, but the Orpheotelest has one of the few genuinely marketable professions left:

“Can you fix an alternator?”

“No.”

“Can you grow corn?”

“Not especially.”

“Can you make Grandma stop appearing at the foot of my bed every night since we had to leave her body at the interstate rest stop?”

“Absolutely! This is my wheelhouse.”

And that makes the image even better for me. Those ridiculous bastards don’t realize it yet, but the most professionally employable person in the picture is the Japanese guy in the shredded robes.

It also brings up an important theological point. The post-apocalypse could produce a spiritual crisis for the faithful of various Monotheist and Neopagan traditions. Not only is there a pessimistic strain in Orphism which inoculates one against that— the expectation that things will fall apart, the decline from the golden to iron age rather than positive evolution and the “myth of progress,” the idea that physical incarnation in this plane is punishment for crimes committed as a daimōn or as Sokrates succinctly put it “dead is better”— within the Starry Bull tradition we have an eschatological explanation that would account for the calamity. The forces allied with the unmaker, from bottom feeding spirits to Giants and Titans that will break their bonds and go rampaging, will temporarily gain control, until the coalition from different pantheons encountered during his travels that Dionysos has spent millennia putting together eventually triumphs, crowning him as the new cosmic ruler. So there’s no, “How could a good God allow this? Does that mean that God is not all-powerful, or that this is his will and he permitted it? If I am allowed to suffer this, does that mean that I’m not among the elect and missed out on the rapture? Wait— my God came back from the dead and encouraged his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood, and with his resurrection the dead, including the “dry bones” of Ezekiel’s vision, shambled toward Jerusalem per Matthew 27:52–53: does that mean he is the cause of the Zombie uprising?” Instead the Orpheotelest just shrugs, rubs their hands, and says, “Better get to work. This crisis isn’t going to resolve itself.”

Starry Bull eschatology would make such a catastrophe horrifying without making it theologically surprising. The apocalypse would constitute a practical and pastoral crisis, but not necessarily a crisis of theodicy.

The tradition already possesses a cosmology in which this event fits an existing mythic grammar.

That’s especially important because our eschatology doesn’t amount to “Dionysos will prevent the catastrophe.” Quite the contrary: catastrophe is part of the sequence. Dionysos’ victory comes through the conflict. His wanderings acquire an eschatological dimension because all those encounters with foreign Gods and pantheons cease to look episodic: over immense stretches of mythic and historical time, he has been assembling relationships and alliances that ultimately matter when cosmic order itself is threatened. The wandering God turns out to have been building a coalition. His eventual sovereignty is therefore not simply Zeus handing his son the keys to Olympos; it is something demonstrated and achieved through Dionysos’ capacity to unite radically different powers against the unmaker.

That gives the individual Orpheotelest a wonderfully grounded place within an enormous myth. They aren’t standing around waiting for Dionysos to win the cosmic battle. Dionysos has his work; they have theirs. If the great powers are fighting Titans, somebody still has to bury the dead. Somebody has to purify the contaminated house, settle the furious ancestor, recognize the predatory spirit taking advantage of everyone’s terror, counsel the survivor who watched their family die, protect the settlement, restore ritual relations with the local Gods and spirits, and remind frightened people that chaos having the upper hand today doesn’t mean chaos is the ultimate victor.

And that fits beautifully with the craft orientation I’ve been discussing. The important question isn’t primarily, “Why did Dionysos allow this?” It’s “how do I fulfill my God’s expectations of me in these changed circumstances?” Theology supplies orientation; vocation supplies action.

Which makes the final image genuinely theological rather than merely comic:

Zombie apocalypse. Titans loose. Civilization collapsed. The dead won’t stay dead.

The Orpheotelest surveys the situation.

“Well, shit.”

Rolls up their sleeves.

“Better get to work.”

This is an extraordinarily Dionysian eschatology: not optimism, because terrible things really can happen; not nihilism, because their happening does not make action meaningless; and not passive apocalypticism, because knowing how the story ultimately ends doesn’t excuse anyone from doing their appointed work in the chapter they’re actually living through.

I don’t normally provide a deep discussion of Starry Bull eschatology because it isn’t the point of the tradition. Our goal is to serve Dionysos and his Retinue as best we can, within the structures of the Starry Bull, and fulfilling our particular vocation. We do our part, the Gods do theirs and we’ll make the best of how things work out. That’s true whether you’re discussing the treatment of a client or grand eschatological themes.

But I’ve smoked a lot of marijuana, so here goes…

Zeus doesn’t pass the keys to Dionysos because he isn’t around to do that. Long ago Dionysos had a vision of the unmaker dissolving and destroying divine order, and the Titans and Giants breaking their bonds. Most of the Olympians did not believe him, attributing his visions to madness. This is why Dionysos sets out to find allies among other pantheons. When Ragnarök occurs the Olympians are not prepared, and most fall in the battle. What is especially tragic is that there are some who genuinely believe Dionysos but cannot join his coalition because they would consider that a violation of their loyalty to Zeus and Hera. Others— most notably Hermes, Apollon and Athena —side with Dionysos. Even so, not everyone who joins the coalition will survive. Normally Olympian Gods are Immortal, and the world goes through cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. But the unmaker seeks to interrupt that process, to annihilate everything. Even the forces allied with the unmaker know its intention but through greed and pursuit of power believe that they can capitalize on the chaos and rule until their domain too gets absorbed by the unmaker. Basically think Egyptian isfet or the nothing from Neverending Story.

Dionysos isn’t the designated heir who eventually receives an orderly succession. He is the disregarded prophet who prepares for a catastrophe the existing order refuses to believe is coming. That makes his madness extraordinarily important. The Olympians’ mistake isn’t necessarily stupidity or wickedness: they have perfectly understandable reasons for discounting catastrophic visions coming from the God of Madness. Unfortunately, this time the Mad God is right.

There’s considerable tragedy in that, especially with the Gods who believe him but remain with Zeus and Hera. Their refusal isn’t cowardice or blindness. On the contrary it’s virtue. But their virtue destroys them. Loyalty, which ordinarily maintains divine order, prevents them from taking the action necessary to survive the destruction of that order. That makes the conflict much richer than dividing the pantheons into enlightened supporters of Dionysos and fools who rejected him. Hermes, Apollon, and Athena make one choice; others make an equally comprehensible choice and perish because of it. And Dionysos presumably has to live with having foreseen precisely that, and not being able to stop it.

The unmaker also clarifies the stakes enormously. It isn’t another claimant to cosmic sovereignty. Titans and Giants can want dominion. Gods can fight Gods. Ages can end. Worlds can die and be born again. All of that still occurs inside the kosmos. The unmaker threatens the process itself. That’s why I make the comparison with Egyptian isfet and the nothing from the Neverending Story. Ordinary destruction can paradoxically belong to life: decomposition produces fertility; death precedes rebirth; Dionysos himself embodies dissolution and return. The unmaker represents something categorically different—not Thanatos within the sequence Bios–Thanatos–Bios, but the attempt to prevent the second Bios from ever arriving. It wants no next turn of the wheel. In fact it wants both Thanatos and the wheel gone.

And that makes the forces knowingly serving it particularly interesting. They’re committing what amounts to the ultimate metaphysical error: mistaking temporary advantage within a collapsing order for victory, even though their victory necessarily creates the conditions of their own annihilation. The Giant thinks, “When Olympos falls, I shall rule its ruins.” The unmaker’s answer is brutally succinct: “What ruins?”

It also explains why Dionysos’ wandering matters so much. Something that can appear almost incidental in mythology—this extraordinarily mobile God appearing in Greece, Anatolia, Egypt, India, the Far North and elsewhere—becomes strategic preparation. The Olympian order is insufficiently broad to survive what is coming, so the wandering stranger does what the established cosmic powers cannot: he builds relationships across boundaries. His apparent marginality becomes his strength. He knows foreigners because he has been the foreigner.

Which makes his eventual kingship profoundly different from ordinary conquest. If most of the established rulers are dead and survivors from numerous divine orders have fought together under his coalition, Dionysos isn’t simply becoming “Zeus 2.0.” Whatever order follows must somehow accommodate the plurality that made survival possible.

And my final point may be the most important theologically: this isn’t what Starry Bull is about.

That prevents eschatology from swallowing religion. The believer doesn’t need to decode current events looking for Giants, determine whether Ragnarök has secretly begun, or obsess over when the unmaker will arrive. In fact, doing so could become a distraction from the obligations immediately in front of them.

The Boukolos has Boukolos work. The Hymnōdos has Hymnōdos work. The Orpheotelest has Orpheotelest work. The ordinary devotee has obligations appropriate to their station. If cosmic dissolution begins tomorrow, those vocations remain meaningful; their circumstances simply become radically different.

I repeat:

We do our part. The Gods do theirs. We make the best of how things work out.

And that produces an unexpectedly modest eschatology despite its enormous scale.

The Orpheotelest doesn’t need to defeat the unmaker. That’s above their pay grade.

There’s a corpse that needs burying, a traumatized survivor who needs tending, an angry ghost that needs placating, and Lord Humongous apparently wants a consultation.

“Better get to work.”

But for me personally the most interesting aspect of this eschatology is twofold: Dionysos creates a new pantheon from the fragments of the world’s diverse pantheons. And that good and evil entities will fight side by side against the unmaker and its allies.

Let’s break that down.

This may be one of the strongest ideas in the eschatology, because it makes the final conflict orthogonal to the ordinary conflict between good and evil. Good and evil are disagreements about what existence should be like. The unmaker represents the abolition of the arena in which that disagreement can occur. A benevolent God wants a flourishing kosmos justly governed. A tyrant wants a kosmos under his domination. A predatory spirit wants victims. A Giant wants territory and power. Even something genuinely monstrous still possesses desires, and desire presupposes that there will be something left to desire. The unmaker offers none of them victory. It offers the eventual extinction of victor and victim alike.

So the question— “What do they govern if nothing exists?” —isn’t merely pragmatic. It’s the metaphysical argument capable of assembling Dionysos’ otherwise impossible coalition.

And importantly, fighting beside Dionysos doesn’t redeem the evil powers. The Giant doesn’t suddenly discover compassion. The demon doesn’t become nice. All remain precisely what they were. They simply recognize that their interests temporarily coincide with those of beings they ordinarily despise.

That provides something much more interesting than the familiar fantasy trope in which everybody puts aside their differences and discovers that deep down they’re basically decent. Some simply aren’t. After the victory, some members of the coalition may immediately become enemies again. The alliance means only: first there must be a world. Then we can fight over what sort of world it will be.

And that makes Dionysos uniquely suited to lead it.

Dionysos doesn’t create unity by creating sameness

Which is deeply Dionysian. Dionysos doesn’t need Athena to become Freyja, an Egyptian God to become Hindu, or a dangerous daimōn to become morally good before they can stand together. He creates a choros out of irreducibly different beings.

That resembles his Retinue on a cosmic scale.

The Bacchic procession has never been composed of respectable, interchangeable citizens marching neatly in formation. Gods, Daimōnes, Heroes, mortals, Satyrs, Seilenoi, Mainades, animals, foreigners, monsters—the heterogeneous multitude itself becomes Dionysian order.

The new pantheon he creates therefore needn’t represent the restoration of the old order after Ragnarök. It is something the catastrophe makes possible that could not have existed beforehand.

The old pantheons were organized substantially through kinship, geography, inherited sovereignty, cult, and historical relationships. Dionysos’ pantheon is assembled through encounter. He has wandered through their worlds, formed relationships, recognized powers the established Olympian order regarded as foreign, and eventually called those relationships in.

So when Olympos falls, Dionysos doesn’t rebuild Olympos.

He builds something Olympos could never have become.

That also gives his wandering retroactive significance without reducing it to a secret master plan. He can genuinely have encountered other Gods for all the ordinary mythological reasons—desire, conquest, initiation, curiosity, exile, madness, revelation—and nevertheless discover that those accumulated relationships are precisely what enables resistance when the old structures collapse.

And the tragedy gets better

The Gods who remain loyal to Zeus and Hera become even more poignant against this background. They aren’t choosing evil over good. They’re choosing order as they understand it over an unprecedented coalition whose legitimacy may appear extremely dubious.

Imagine what Dionysos’ proposal must sound like before the catastrophe.

The mad younger God announces that he has foreseen the destruction of the cosmic order. He wants Olympians to cooperate with foreign Gods, perhaps ancient enemies and morally repellent beings, because he claims an entity beyond ordinary divine conflict, who comes from outside the kosmos itself, is going to annihilate everything.

From the perspective of a conservative Olympian, refusing him might be the responsible choice.

And some believe him but cannot abandon their loyalties anyway.

That is tragedy rather than stupidity.

It also changes what “evil” means without relativizing it. I especially like this because you don’t need to conclude that good and evil are illusions. They’re real distinctions—but they aren’t the most fundamental distinction imaginable.

Beneath the ethical opposition lies another:

Being / Unbeing.

Or perhaps, more appropriately for Starry Bull theology:

Bios → Thanatos → Bios

versus

Bios → Thanatos → —

The second is what the unmaker wants. Death isn’t the enemy because death belongs to the cycle. But nothingness does not. Dionysos himself guarantees that. The horror is death from which nothing can emerge: no decomposition becoming fertility, no descent followed by ascent, no memory, no rebirth, no transformation, no next generation, no next world.

That makes the unmaker almost the perfect theological antithesis of Dionysos.

Dionysos destroys forms constantly. He tears apart boundaries, identities, bodies, kingdoms, sanity, sometimes even himself— but something comes through the rupture. His destruction is fecund.

The unmaker’s destruction is sterile.

Dionysos dissolves so that becoming can continue.

The unmaker dissolves becoming itself.

And suddenly the strange coalition makes complete sense. Even monsters have a stake in becoming.

Which brings us back to the Orpheotelest. The cosmic story and the treatment of one client express the same religious posture at radically different scales.

Dionysos doesn’t sit around contemplating the philosophical implications of the unmaker. He gathers whoever can be gathered and does what his circumstances require.

The Orpheotelest doesn’t need to spend Tuesday afternoon worrying whether Ragnarök begins this Thursday.

There is a client in front of them.

“How do I fulfill my God’s expectations of me in these changed circumstances?”

That question works when the changed circumstance is bereavement, illness, haunting, pollution, community breakdown—or the collapse of divine order itself.

And perhaps that’s why the eschatology doesn’t need to be central. If the tradition has formed someone properly, they already know what to do when the end of the world comes.

Not necessarily how to win.

But how to remain what they are while the world changes around them.

I’m having a conversation with a friend, and she wrote:

Whenever I hear Conservatives keep calling the Leftist Elites ( and ignoring the ones on the Right ) “Pagan” it really pisses me off. I find modern Christianity to be Evil myself. My worry is Christians will rise up and go on a Crusade ( another name for Jihad ) and go after every “unbeliever”. After all, “Freedom of Religion” to them means only Christians have Freedom. Everyone else is Evil ( Jews are just misguided at best ).

Yeah the cesspool does deeper than we think. And only Divine Intervention can cleanse it all. 

To which I responded:

There’s no true Right or Left in this country. It’s all astroturfed or a psyop. The question is just who’s signing the checks and pulling the strings. I suspect there’s competing actors, and I wonder if their stooges ever meet in a bar and swap work stories. Usually of the “why do I have to work with such stupid fucking people?” type, with a sympathetic pat on the back by his ideological foe.

I think this country is fucked, whatever way things spin out. Moslem Jihad. Christian Jihad. Rainbow Coalition Jihad. Corporate or Tech Bro Jihad. Chinese or Chinese-sponsored Commie Jihad.

None of these are going to be good for us. I don’t want to live in a society under any of their boots, or in one being torn apart as they compete for the prize.

I just want to live my life, have others live theirs, waive to them across the fence as I get the mail, and not think about them again until we’re both taking the garbage out on Friday at 7:00 in the morning, having forgotten to do it the night before. Polite waive, and we go back to ignoring one another.

I mean, that’s not really what I want, but cult compounds are expensive, especially if you’re lacking the cult part. So polite indifference is the best one can hope for. Hell, I’ll even add small talk into the mix if I absolutely have to.

Anything that fucks with that is bad in my book.

To which she added:

Also, I agree Epstein was lower on the totem pole than we think ( wether he was with Mossad or not ). And the Elite Pedophiles are being used as an excuse to erase our Freedoms once and for all with Digital ID and other such laws.

To which I answered:

They were gonna push that through regardless. Which at least tells you which dystopian novel we’re going to be living through. Frankly I’d rather have Elite Satanic Pedophiles than Zombies. I’m not a child, so I’m probably safe; and with my back injury I ain’t running, from either shambling corpses or a cannibal gang from a bad 80s metal video. Isn’t it weird how quickly they go in this cinema from khakis and cardigans to mohawks and pleather gimp attire, from insurance broker to warlord. “Like, dude– sorry Lord Humongous, slayer of the Rowdy Boys– it’s been two weeks since the dead started crawling out of their graves and the number one military in the world by a massive margin with a trillion a year budget crumbled in 48 hours, but this is the aesthetic statement you want to make? Really? I feel like you would have looted the military supply store or local police station and found more practical and intimidating attire. But not my call. I’m just passing through… unless you have need of an itinerant Bacchic Orphic religious specialist? And judging by your compatriot who’s chowing down on a lady’s thigh like it’s a turkey leg at a Ren Faire, I am guessing you just might.”

To clarify, the attendees of Dionysos’ symposion in the last image are from left to right: Pythagoras, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Jim Morrison, Benjamin Franklin, Jane Ellen Harrison, Anaïs Nin, and David Bowie. Tell me you wouldn’t want to sit back with the best wine you could imagine listening to this diverse collection of Dionysian luminaries having a stimulating conversation. According to Plato this was the ideal image of “Orphic heaven” and I can’t really disagree. (Especially since they culminate in orgies.)

One of the things I caught going over the Lexicon is that I had  Ἁλιεύς listed as “sailor.”

More accurately it means “fisherman.” I considered deleting and replacing it, but as I looked deeper into the word’s associations I had to keep it. A whole symbolic network suddenly appeared.

The fisherman is one who:

• waits patiently
• understands hidden currents
• casts the net
• gathers rather than chases
• brings hidden life up from the depths

That reflects Dionysos remarkably well.

For instance, consider the net itself with its connected epithets Βρόχος “of the noose; net; spider’s web” and Παράβολος “who casts his net.”

In Greek religion, nets are already liminal objects. They capture what is elusive, they draw hidden things into the light, and they blur the line between violence and providence. Dionysos himself is associated with nets in several contexts, whether through cultic inscriptions, mythic imagery, or the broader symbolic vocabulary surrounding capture and revelation. One theory is that Ζαγρεύς doesn’t come from Ζά (“great”) and Αγρεύς (“hunter”) but from ζαγρος meaning a pit which along with nets was used in the capture of live animals. 

Within Starry Bull, of course, net naturally suggest spiders and their webs, a densely packed symbol.  

Ἁλιεύς becomes even richer. A fishing net and a spider’s web are structurally the same symbol:

• both are woven
• both are patient
• both are receptive rather than aggressive
• both reveal themselves only after they’ve caught something

That dovetails beautifully with Ἀληθής as Revealing rather than just Truth. The relationship between ἀλήθεια and λήθη (“forgetfulness,” “concealment”) has always fascinated philosophers, but it seems especially at home in Starry Bull theology because of our unique interpretation of the Orphic gold leaves. Our tradition already emphasizes refusing Lethe in favor of Memory. If ἀλήθεια is understood—even poetically—as the lifting of concealment, then the soul that drinks from Memory is not merely remembering facts. It is becoming capable of recognizing what was always true.

As an epithet that makes Ἀληθής much more than “truthful.” It becomes the God who removes the veil.

And for a mystery religion, that’s about as central an epithet as one could imagine.

Truth is not simply proclaimed. It is drawn forth. One casts the net into the unseen and discovers what has been living beneath the surface all along.

In fact, there’s a lovely progression in the Lexicon:

• Ἀληθής — the Revealing One.
• Ἁλιεύς — the Fisherman who draws hidden things forth.
• Ἀλλότριος — the Stranger who first appears alien.
• Ἀλύων — the One who sends us wandering until we are ready to recognize him.

Read in a different order we get: first Dionysos is encountered as Ἀλλότριος (the Stranger). Through wandering (Ἀλύων) and revelation (Ἀληθής), we discover he was never truly foreign.

That’s almost an initiatory map.

As I mentioned, I’m reworking the Lexicon of Epithets and Bynames of Dionysos, which has me reflecting on their meaning. One that I’ve been thinking a lot about is Βρασμός, a Starry Bull coinage meaning “boiling up; shaking; fermentation.”

Fermentation is one of the best natural analogies for Dionysian transformation. Outwardly, something appears to decay or become unstable. Inwardly, an invisible process is transmuting it into something new.

That makes it an unexpectedly elegant bridge between:

• wine
• initiation
• madness
• spiritual growth
• death and rebirth

It’s almost a one-word summary of Dionysian theology.

What makes it especially Dionysian is that fermentation refuses to let death be the last image. A carcass decays. Grapes ferment. Seeds germinate underground. Compost nourishes vines. In every case, apparent dissolution conceals a creative process.

The theme repeats whether you’re talking about the Olbian tablets, the Black Sun, pruning, or Ivanov’s orchards. Fermentation is one more expression of the same pattern: life does not merely follow death; it often works through it.

When it comes to Dionysos the modern popular imagination tends to stop at wine. Fermentation is one of nature’s great mysteries, which was especially important to the ancient Greek conception of him. You have the life coming out of death Orphic insight; the process which produces alcohol; metaphorically it suggests the bubbling up of passion and madness; but there’s also a civilizing aspect to it. Without fermentation we wouldn’t have cheese, yogurt, or even bread.

When you look at your next bottle of wine, don’t look at it like a modern person. To someone in antiquity, grapes did not merely “become” wine through chemistry. They appeared to undergo a hidden transformation:

• sweet juice darkens
• it begins to bubble
• it grows warm
• invisible forces awaken within it
• and what emerges is no longer simply grape juice but something with entirely new properties

This is Dionysos, and his power of fermentation goes so much deeper, expands out so much further

Cosmological:
Life emerges from apparent decay. Rot and generation are not opposites but partners.

Psychological:
Passion, inspiration, and madness “ferment” within a person before erupting outward. The unseen interior process precedes the visible transformation.

Initiatory:
An initiate often appears unchanged externally while something is quietly working within. Then, at the right moment, the transformation becomes evident.

Agricultural:
The grape, grain, and milk all become something greater through controlled transformation.

That last point is especially important.

Today, fermentation is often associated almost exclusively with alcohol because alcohol dominates the cultural conversation. For most of human history, fermentation was simply one of the great technologies of civilization. Where would we be without not just what I mentioned above, but all of these items too:

Bread.
Cheese.
Yogurt.
Beer.
Wine.
Vinegar.
Preserved vegetables.

No civilization I’d want to be a part of. And yet all are made possible through fermentation. Fermentation allowed communities to store food, survive winters, improve nutrition, and create entirely new kinds of nourishment. It is both wild and domesticated, dependent on invisible living agents, yet guided by human craft.

That duality feels profoundly Dionysian.

One other thing it makes me think of is the recurring distinction between craft and sect. Fermentation is not just miraculous: it is a τέχνη. The vintner doesn’t command fermentation; he cooperates with it. He creates the conditions under which transformation can occur. Which is basically how spiritual formation in the Starry Bull occurs. The Boukolos or Orpheotelest doesn’t manufacture enlightenment. They prune, cultivate, protect, teach, and wait. The actual transformation has its own life, and happens under Dionysos’ direction. Which creates kairos. Fermentation cannot be forced: too little time and the wine is unfinished. Too much neglect and it spoils. The vintner must recognize the right moment.

So must the gardener.

So must the initiator.

So must the worshiper.

The same Dionysian principle appears again and again: transformation has its own season.

I shouldn’t be surprised that Βρασμός is one of those Dionysian epithets that ends up carrying far more theological weight than its modest appearance suggests. Like Αὐξιτής (“Giver of Increase”), it’s grounded in an ordinary process that unfolds into a remarkably comprehensive symbol. It speaks simultaneously of vineyards, kitchens, civilization, the mysteries, the soul, and the God who presides over all of them. (Yeah, I’m planning a separate post on Auxitēs but it’s not kairos to discuss it.)

A friend asked me if I was celebrating an upcoming festival, details of which can be found on the Bakcheion website. I answered:

I’m an Orpheotelest and Hymnōd. I don’t celebrate festivals. (Except the ones the rest of my household keep, which are mostly Norse or Slavic.) The Bakcheion calendar is for Boukoloi and regular Starry Bull folk. Hymnōdai have an entirely distinct calendar, which is solar as opposed to lunar. We have daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly observances. Festivals are a communal thing. Orpheotelestai are itinerant religious specialists, and the Hymnōdai a monastic order. Both are outsiders to community.

In addition to being the Apostle to the Gentiles, and a Saint and Martyr venerated within most branches of Christianity, Paul is one of the Heroes of the Starry Bull tradition of Bacchic Orphism.

I’m sure that this is a confusing statement for a lot of readers, especially since for many people today a hero is the main character of the story (often a fictional or heavily fictionalized account) who battles bad guys, solves puzzles, gets the girl, grows from a naive novice through a series of character-building adventures into a mass murderer, wise teacher, or trustworthy leader (depending on genre) and usually dies in an act of noble self-sacrifice which preserves others and ensures that the hero’s memory (and ability to generate merchandise) will endure, at least until Hollywood retcons, reboots and engages in “creative” recasting enough to irreparably damage the hero’s legacy. Ask yourself why studios and their shareholders are willing to lose billions and risk alienating their fanbase to degrade the cultural icons of past generations, and you’ll probably have your answer. One may hold differing spiritual taxonomies, values and politics, theories about why this is happening, and even whether this deconstruction may ultimately prove to be a positive thing— but few would argue that these heroes are devoid of ethical value and cultural significance, and since Hollywood is offering no memorable replacements this is having an effect on the collective psyche and society at large. Heroes of this sort teach us who we are, who we want to become, what a good person and good life look like, and they struggle with or triumph through the culture’s values and norms. When a culture loses its heroes, so too is an important piece of personal formation lost.   

But the Starry Bull understanding of what such beings are, do, and mean is strongly influenced by the ancient Greek conception of the ἥρως; basically a dead person who remains powerfully active in the world of the living through dreams, visions, oracles, healing, promotion of fertility, protection of the community and other miraculous demonstrations of their posthumous δύναμις and κλέος. Their power is usually geographically limited to the area around their grave, cenotaph, underground chamber, cave, grove, or temple— with notable exceptions such as Heraklēs, Odysseus, Achilles, Alexander or Antinous who had various cult-centers throughout the Mediterranean, Near East and Asia Minor. Bacchic Heroes are not tied to a particular locale either. They don’t necessarily have to be paragons of virtue. Nor do they necessarily have to have been confessional Dionysians in life— though they do have to be active within the domain of Dionysos. Starry Bull Heroes can be broken down into the following three categories: 

• Confessional Dionysians whose earthly lives were already devoted to Dionysos. Some of them suffered or died because of this devotion. 
• Those who joined the Retinue after death because of the beauty of his domain, the quality of afterlife experienced by its residents, or their belief in the cause for which he is collecting souls.
• Figures whose image Dionysos appropriated, especially where cultural circumstances made direct engagement impossible. 

Some of the souls who reside with Dionysos in Nysa do not leave the awe-inspiring Mountain or its flower-rich meadow, or the feasting hall within the Mountain; others go on special missions to our world and ride with the Furious Host to combat monsters, assist living Dionysians, or engage in diplomatic missions to other parts of the supernatural realms and their inhabitants. These spirits are granted the status of Bacchic Heroes and revered by adherents of the Starry Bull tradition in a variety of ways, many of them modeled on the practices of ancient Greek hero cultus, especially the unique rites and customs of Bacchic Orphic religious associations (thiasoi, speira, orgeones, and collegia are the commonest names for these groups) and their wider communities, if they existed. There are several categories among the Bacchic Heroes, though it is uncertain if there are more categories than these, as our knowledge is based on a combination of tradition and direct, experiential engagement with them: 

• The Phylakitai: Warriors who have pledged their loyalty to Dionysos, and the defense of Nysa and its inhabitants. 
• Technitēs: Artists who bring inspiration and skill to those using their gifts to honor Dionysos and his Retinue. 
• The Prophētai: Gifted diviners and seers who help ward the space and assist the mantis who calls on them. 
• Architelestai: Master ritualists who protect and assist Bacchic spiritworkers who call on them. 
• The Mystai: Initiates who are committed to helping those who have, or are currently undergoing the process of initiation.
• The Anaktes: Elders of the tradition, who are entrusted with its protection and flourishing. Must be consulted on any important matters or changes being considered.  

Since status as a Hero in the Starry Bull tradition does not imply doctrinal perfection (but someone having embodied, transmitted, or revealed something genuinely valuable within the larger Dionysian story) that leaves room for figures from very different traditions to stand alongside one another without erasing their differences or requiring that everything they taught be adopted wholesale. It’s a surprisingly flexible model, and consistent with our broader conviction that Dionysos’ activity is not confined to one geography, ethnicity, time period or even  religious institution, which is how Paul and a number of other Jewish and Christian figures found their way to Nysa, among them:

• John the Baptist
• Marcus the Magician
• Saint Genesios
• Saint Tryphon
• Ex-Saint Margaret of Antioch
• Saint Denys

We’re not saying Paul and the others were part of a secret Bacchic Orphic sect, or that Christianity is simply Dionysianism under a different name. Rather, we’re looking at places where traditions intersect, symbols migrate, and individuals become part of a much larger religious vocabulary and history.

Paul is especially interesting in that regard because he lived and wrote in a thoroughly Hellenistic world. Whether one approaches his letters as scripture, literature, or historical documents, they employ imagery and vocabulary that audiences steeped in Greek culture would have recognized. This recognition in part is because of his extensive use of Bacchic Orphic and general mystery technical language, but also the role he plays in folk Christianity beginning with the Paul and Thecla literature which has strong parallels to Euripides’ portrayal of Dionysos in the Bakchai. Even ignoring the linguistic and thematic borrowings, The Acts of Paul and Thecla is certainly an unusual work within early Christian literature: dramatic, itinerant, full of reversals, miraculous escapes, charismatic authority, challenges to civic expectations and a prominent position given to women, especially Thecla who is the true star of the story. Then there’s Paul’s involvement in Tarantism, which I’ve discussed here and here. Tarantism has long fascinated historians because it occupies that liminal space between medicine, religion, music, dance, folk practice, and ecstatic healing. 

In different regions Tarantism could be associated with different Saints — John the Baptist, Saint Rocco, the Apostle Peter, etc — but I don’t think it’s accidental that Saint Paul has such strong associations with the phenomena. 

Paul’s canonical Epistles and the book of Acts present his reports of visionary and ecstatic experiences such as his ascent to the “third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12) and exercising charismatic gifts (1 Corinthians 13) such as healing, gnōsis, and glossolalia. 

In one of his most memorable adventures (Acts 28:3-6) Paul acquired passage on a ship that was wrecked during a terrible storm. Paul and several of his compatriots survived, washing ashore on a Maltese beach. While adding some wood to keep the fire going, a viper who’d been hiding in the stack latched onto his arm. His compatriots were certain that this proved he had incurred the disfavor of the Gods and would soon die, but after praying Paul shook the snake loose and was perfectly fine, demonstrating supernatural immunity to the creature’s venom.

And a little known fact about Paul that’s often obscured in English translations is that he’s said to have supported his mission for a number of years by working with his hands as a σκηνοποιός. Traditionally this is translated as “tentmaker” but the exact meaning has been debated. The word is rare, and scholars have proposed leatherworking, awning-making, sail-making, or related crafts. However the obvious interpretation is what the Greek straightforwardly says: someone who makes the σκηνή. 

This is a theatrical term for the backdrop of the stage, which concealed the actors’ dressing-room. Considering the parts of the Roman Empire he was traveling through there’s a good chance Paul was working for the Technitai Dionysou, an international network of guilds consisting of performers, playwrights, craftsmen and others who not only put on theatrical performances but staged festivals, music, public ritual and civic spectacles. These guilds became immensely popular during the Hellenistic period when monarchs employed visual propaganda to legitimize their rule and create national identities. The guilds gained not only prestige but wealth, prerogatives and political power; they survived the absorption of the Hellenistic kingdoms and city-states into Rome, and either merged with the Imperial Cult or received patronage by the Emperors and their households. 

Although professional associations to some degree, the guilds were often organized like thiasoi with priests and other religious functionaries. So even if Paul wasn’t a member he likely traveled in the same circles as the Technitai Dionysou (both figuratively and literally) and one can imagine the sorts of conversations they had after hours or while they were putting up or breaking down the stage and set-pieces. I suspect this is how Paul became conversant in Dionysian literary and mystery terminology, rather than him necessarily being a secret convert to Bacchic Orphism considering that his writings— especially Romans and Galatians —show him to be a pious (albeit heterodox) diasporan Jew and member of the nascent Jesus movement. Then again Paul traveled thousands of miles through ports, market towns, sanctuaries, colonies, and major urban centers. He lodged with artisans, merchants, patrons, householders, synagogue communities, and converts. He preached in public spaces and private homes. He spent time imprisoned. He sailed with merchants and soldiers. He debated philosophers in Athens and spoke before governors. The overall picture we get from  Acts is of someone constantly crossing social boundaries. In fact it’s probable that he also interacted and communicated with even more marginal figures than the New Testament portrays, considering his occasional subject matter and language—  itinerant religious specialists, magicians, pilgrims, and temple functionaries or holy men. Precisely the sort of people Paul was trying to reach, people of other religious, class, social and ethnic backgrounds— the outcast and despised —despite limited agreement with those people’s beliefs and practices. However, the more time you spend among and talking with such fellow travelers the more you pick up their lingo, consciously or not. It’s not like they had Keeping up with the Kardashians or Dancing With the Stars so they discussed mystic and sacred things over the campfire. Or probably argued. But Paul remembered those conversations later on when he sat down to compose his Epistles, especially to cities which had a strong Dionysian culture such as Corinth or Thyateira. 

Hmm. Who does that sound like? Hint: his name rhymes with raucous. 

It’s also fitting for Paul himself. Whatever else he was, he was a communicator. Good communicators don’t merely transmit ideas— they learn the language, assumptions, metaphors, and concerns of the people in front of them. They are assimilative, becoming whatever or whomever they are currently communicating with. Whether he was speaking to synagogue-goers, philosophers, artisans, or devotees of local cults, it would have been almost impossible not to absorb something of their vocabulary along the way.

Or as Paul explicitly tells us, in order to make converts he adapted himself rhetorically:

“I have become all things to all people…”

Whatever one thinks of that statement theologically, it demonstrates a remarkable awareness of audience and communication.

I suspect that’s one reason Paul’s letters still feel so alive. They don’t read like someone writing from an ivory tower. They read like someone who has spent years on dusty roads, in workshops, on ships, and around campfires, talking late into the night with anyone willing to listen. That image seems entirely consistent with the historical Paul, regardless of where one ultimately lands on the theological questions surrounding him. 

Another was Paul’s liminal traits which were probably a factor in his becoming associated with Tarantism rather than the thousands of other Saints recognized by Christendom in both the East and West. 

Saint Paul was:

• a visionary
• a traveler
• a miracle worker
• someone associated with snakes
• someone who survived poison
• someone who mediates between cultures
• someone who undergoes a radical transformation, and causes radical transformations in others through dance and ecstasy, especially women

Dionys— sorry, Saint Paul is unusually adaptable within folk religion because of these motifs. A folklorist might answer by tracing local traditions, regional symbolism, healing rituals, and the interaction between official Christianity and vernacular practice. Our methodology and conclusions are much simpler: perhaps the Saint’s symbolically compatible image became a vessel through which Dionysos continued to act, in parts of Italy that were profoundly Catholic (though in Greek and Roman times they had been centers of Bacchic cult, often with a strong Orphic influence.). That isn’t a historical hypothesis in the ordinary sense. It’s a hermeneutic— a way of understanding the religious meaning of the tradition.

This is not a declarative statement. There is simply no way to meet academic standards of certainty regarding the assertion that Dionysos traveled around visiting his old cult centers in 16th century Italy wearing the face of Saint Paul, spreading collective madness in his wake which caused portions of the populace to dance compulsively— but when said Saint abducts a woman from her oppressive and violent family, seduces her, makes passionate love to her, marries her, and periodically forces her to dance along with the crowd until she reaches an ecstatic state, well … that doesn’t sound like the behavior of one of the most prolific Biblical  authors to me. Especially since this was not an isolated incident but a pattern repeated thousands of times from Tarantism’s origin around the 12th-13th centuries to its decline and eventual demise in the 1950s and ‘60s. 

That distinction matters because it allows people to engage with the idea without requiring them to accept it as a conclusion of historical scholarship. That scholarship may help elucidate the circumstances which contributed to the emergence of Tarantism— either as a cult of collective mania that spontaneously erupted in impoverished and often war-torn communities in Spain, Italy, France and Germany or atavistic expressions of Bacchic cults dating back to the period of Greek colonization which occurred because of the activity of Dionysos. Whichever way you choose, historical discoveries do not usually alter things. For instance, suppose that next week a document definitively proving that σκηνοποιός meant “tent-maker” was discovered in a trash heap dating from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE. It removes a pillar of proof, but doesn’t change a thing, regardless of which position you take. 

Though this does bring up a principle I’ve repeatedly stressed in discussions about the Starry Bull tradition: the importance of transparency regarding sources and levels of certainty. We’re not saying, “This is an established, incontrovertible fact,” but rather, “This is how our tradition understands these recurring patterns.” And while these categories are given different weight within the tradition we’re completely up front about whether something is based on an ancient source, and what kind of source it was; or if it’s something we were given during ritual or a dream or in a vision; if it’s something we deduced through careful study and reflection or in conversation with colleagues; and even if it’s pure speculation or a pun or nerdy joke that you need to be familiar with a dozen sources spread over a thousand years to truly get. All of these are considered legitimate sources of knowledge and have served as grounds for consideration when it comes to possibly including something as part of the Starry Bull tradition. The words “consideration” and “possible inclusion” are important since that alone is not sufficient grounds for adopting something into the tradition. It’s a first step which triggers analysis, debate by members, consultation of Boukoloi and Orpheotelestai and other elders of the tradition, as well as prayer, offerings and divination or an oracular session with Dionysos; as well as experimentation, testing its efficacy and longevity, and that the novel element fits within the complex network of symbols, metaphors, ritual vocabulary, and the overarching conceptual framework of the tradition. All of these are pathways to truth which should ideally be considered or traversed before that important decision is reached, unless there are sufficient grounds for skipping steps. We did not rush into accepting Tarantism as one of the strains that formed the Starry Bull tradition, and “Saint Paul” as a πρόσωπον adopted by Dionysos when he spent time in Southern Italy and other locations where Tarantism and related outbreaks of collective madness occurred from the expulsion of the Kalbid Dynasty who ruled on behalf of the Fatimid Caliphate to attempts to modernize and assimilate the rural parts of Sicily and Southern Italy, ranging from increased access to psychiatric treatment to widespread use of pesticides to eliminate the spiders whose bite brought on the healing crisis of Tarantism.  

I am revamping the Lexicon of Titles and Bynames of Dionysos (marking whether it’s an ancient or Starry Bull coinage, polishing the Greek, refining the definitions, etc) and it’s got me reflecting on a number of his names. For instance Δαφνηφάγος which means “Eater of the Laurel; Inspired.”

Daphnēphagos is marked as a Starry Bull coinage although it appears in the Greek Magical Papyri of late antiquity because there, naturally enough, it is an epithet belonging to Apollon: our application of it to Dionysos is novel, and that change makes it Starry Bull. (That’s called bricolage, bitches.) A lot of lists, and the Hellenic polytheists who use them, tend to isolate and flatten the epithets, treating them like dictionary entries to be collected and catalogued rather than powerful loci where myth, ritual, literature, theology, history and personal experience converge. I will use Daphnēphagos as an example of what I have taken to calling “semantic layering.” 

The first layer of this epithet is straightforward: it belongs to Apollon, and the image is immediately Delphic. In an interesting reverse-imitatio the God performs the act of chewing the laurel which was part of the Pythia’s preparation to serve as his oracle; so the epithet already carries connotations of inspiration and divine speech.

The second layer is seasonal. During the winter months (when the oracle was inactive) Apollon departs for the lands beyond the Far North and Dionysos and his Thyiads arrive to perform a sequence of rituals. Even during the rest of the year Euphorion claimed that the pieces of Dionysos which Apollon salvaged from the sparagmos committed by the Titans were kept beneath the tripod which the Pythia sat upon during the oracular session. All of this gives Dionysos a legitimate claim to Delphic imagery as well.

The third layer is literary-historical. Plutarch, who served as a Priest at Delphi, preserves passages in which Aischylos and Sophokles deliberately blur the distinction between the two Gods. Those texts are fascinating precisely because they resist contemporary attempts to make Apollon and Dionysos polar opposites. In those passages Dionysos is called “lover of the bay.” This is not merely borrowing an attribute— it invites the audience to perceive a deeper kinship between these Gods, and Dionysos’ relationship to the plant world.

Which leads to the botanical layer. Plutarch observes elsewhere that all plants and trees fall under Dionysos’ generative domain, in which case the laurel is not alien territory at all. It becomes one more manifestation of his vegetative abundance just as ivy, vine, pine, myrtle, pomegranate, fig, apple and countless other sacred plants are. The bay is simply encountered through a different symbolic pathway.

Finally, there is the theological layer. The Starry Bull tradition consistently presents Dionysos as a master of all the ways by which Gods communicate their will to humankind— dreams and  incubation, lots and astragaloi, omens and klēdōnes, pyromancy and lecanomancy, ekstasis and enthousiasmos, inspired poetry and symbolic insight, etc. In that framework Daphnēphagos ceases to be merely “the God who chews laurel.” It becomes “the God who consumes inspiration itself.”

That’s an image I find remarkably evocative, which is why I stole— uh, bricolaged the epithet. The act is no longer simply preparatory, as it is for the Pythia. Dionysos internalizes the plant of prophecy because prophecy is native to him rather than merely mediated through him.

I also like that it quietly undercuts the overly rigid “Apollonian versus Dionysian” dichotomy that has dominated modern imagination since Nietzsche. Even Nietzsche, for all his brilliance, intentionally sharpened the contrast for philosophical purposes. The ancient evidence is often much more fluid. At Delphi especially, the two Gods appear less like rivals than like alternating aspects of a sacred rhythm: one presiding over the bright portion of the year, the other encountered in the dark. The Thracians saw Apollon as the heavenly Day Sun, and Dionysos the underworld Night Sun. And so forth. That makes Daphnēphagos feel less like an appropriation and more like a recovery of an older conversation between the two Gods— a conversation that, in Orphic terms,  many modern readers have forgotten but which authors like Plutarch still remembered.

And sadly I’m not just talking about philosophy nerds, history buffs and the like— over the years I have encountered a number of Hellenic Polytheists who believe that if you have a close relationship with one of these sons of Zeus you cannot venerate the other. Not only is this completely alien to the theologies of ancient Greece, it is a gross misreading of Nietzsche who was writing as a philologist, art theorist, and historian NOT a theologian. This is why weltanschauung is so important. This situation perfectly illustrates how a modern philosophical interpretation can become reified into theology if one doesn’t have a proper grasp of the beliefs and norms of the cultures in which the Gods first presented themselves and their worship originated. If someone concludes, “My personal and household cultus focuses more on Dionysos than Apollon,” that’s one thing. Religious life has always included personal affinities. But you would be hard-pressed to find evidence supporting the assertion that devotion to one precluded devotion to the other. Polytheism generally tolerates, even insists upon, cultivating multiple devotional relationships. It’s right there is the name: the -ism of having πολύ “many” θεοί “Gods.”

Now, within the Starry Bull tradition Friedrich Nietzsche is regarded as a prophet who spent his final years as an incarnate Dionysos— but that doesn’t mean that everything he wrote is to be treated as Gospel Truth. Birth of Tragedy contains genius insights— and incredibly beautiful passages, such as the Prose Hymn —but also some ideas that miss the mark by a long distance. Even Nietzsche himself rejected the “youthful excesses” of the book later in his career, and would probably be seriously disappointed that this single tome is what he is primarily remembered for, after his aphorisms “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “those who hunt monsters must be careful that in so doing they do not themselves become a monster” which has dominated pop culture since the mid-20th century, to the point that it’s often quoted like Scripture.

Something important is lost when philosophical categories are mistaken for descriptions of religious practice.

Nietzsche’s “Apollonian and Dionysian” are heuristic categories developed to explain the emergence of Greek tragedy. They are aesthetic principles before they are anything else: form and ecstasy, individuation and dissolution, dream and intoxication. Whether one ultimately agrees with his analysis or not, he was not attempting to reconstruct an ancient Greek theology. He was asking, “What creative forces produced Aischylos and Sophokles?” That’s a very different question from, “How did ancient Greeks understand and worship Apollon and Dionysos?”

The historical evidence consistently complicates any attempt to make the Gods into simple opposites, even limiting ourselves to a few well-known examples:

• Delphi belongs to both Gods in different seasons.
• Dionysos and Apollon both preside over music, poetry, and prophecy in different ways.
• Plutarch is not the only author who preserves traditions in which their attributes deliberately overlap. It’s a secondary thesis of Macrobius’ Saturnalia, and he provides a greater number and variety of sources to back up the claim. 
• Tragedy itself— Nietzsche’s great subject —was performed in honor of Dionysos, yet is one of the most carefully structured and “Apollonian” artistic forms imaginable.

Most Gods possess some degree of overlap in powers and concerns with other Gods. Distinct identities do not require mutually exclusive domains.

Friedrich Nietzsche serves as a good case study for how we regard and treat prophets within the Starry Bull tradition. A Starry Bull prophet is someone whom Dionysos has inspired with a message to communicate to others. Now, that message is being transmitted through a flawed and fallible human being so there is no guarantee that it is coming through with 100% clarity and accuracy. We also believe that the message is what is divine. Other things they have said may or may not contain Dionysos’ inspiration. Since we are talking about human beings there is the physical component which must be accounted for too. In Nietzsche’s case his inspiration may have been partly caused by syphilis (though I read an article which suggested that everything from the Turin horse until his death was a performance intended to demonstrate his philosophical principles in action; and another that he made a conscious, rational decision to embrace insanity as a path to higher wisdom.) Another of our prophets, Philip K. Dick, may have been made receptive to inspiration by a bad tooth infection and the meds he was on, plus incipient schizophrenia or OCPD. But that doesn’t change the fact that he wrote several books and thousands of pages of analysis of his mystical experience, much of which focuses on Dionysos. This tells you nothing about the message, just the likely mechanism by which it occurred. And I say likely because plenty of revelations happen without such extreme triggers, nor is every syphilitic or sufferer from a toothache granted the charism of prophecy. Even if their inspiration is genuine and they produce an account of a dream or hallucination, aphorisms, a poem, a song, choreography, an essay, an academic book, a genre novel, a comic book, a video game, the script for a play, movie, or series, a statue, a painting, a sermon, a street-corner diatribe, a blog post, or however that inspiration finds expression the individual remains a historically situated human being with blind spots, biases, personal agendas, incomplete or jumbled thoughts. Additionally the προφήτης is also a messenger of the Gods— the authority lies in what they are communicating, not in their person. And if the message they have been tasked with disseminating concerns how great, wise, powerful, infallible and respected they should be that is a red flag bigger than the phallic monument in Washington DC. 

Ironically, I suspect Nietzsche himself would have preferred this position to that of the Abrahamic and some other major world religions. One of the recurring themes across his work is resistance to turning thinkers into idols, however much he may have admired them. He delighted in overturning certainties— including his own. His later prefaces and writings often revisit, revise, or qualify earlier positions. Though Birth of Tragedy remained important to him, I’ve already mentioned his acknowledgment of its excesses and immaturity. He was far less interested in preserving a perfectly consistent “system” than in provoking new ways of seeing.

The popular reception has almost inverted that spirit. The handful of aphorisms his fame primarily rests on are detached from their context and their interpretation twisted all out of proportion to his original intent. He especially was critical of the rigid and simplistic  “Apollonian/Dionysian” dichotomy which had already become the popular interpretation in his lifetime. His mature corpus is considerably richer— exploring philology, psychology, the mastery and overcoming of the self, eternal recurrence and amor fati, the creation of values in the absence of absolutes, the artistic shaping of one’s life, and a critique of nihilism all occupy his later publications, but since that material doesn’t fit on t-shirts and bumper stickers it is less well known. There is a certain irony in the very thinker who urged readers not to cling to fixed conceptual oppositions now being most famous for one of the strongest conceptual oppositions in modern intellectual history. And the Gods who, ancient worshippers frequently celebrated together have, in some modern imaginations, become rivals because of misinterpretations of a nineteenth-century work on aesthetics rather than ancient cult or myth. That inversion is almost worthy of one of Dionysos’ own dramas.

And yet frustrating as that must be for the man with the second most famous mustache in Germany, that’s nothing compared to the way that his own sister betrayed him. After Nietzsche’s collapse Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche became the principal editor and curator of his literary estate. She was a German nationalist married to the prominent antisemite Bernhard Förster who attempted to found an Aryan colony in a jungle and failed disastrously. Her editorial decisions —especially surrounding the posthumously assembled Will to Power —did much to encourage readings of Nietzsche that aligned with nationalist and authoritarian ideologies, even though those readings sit uneasily with many of Nietzsche’s published works. Not only is this intellectually dishonest it’s vile considering how much Nietzsche LOATHED antisemites. The evidence from Nietzsche’s own writings and correspondence is striking. He repeatedly criticized antisemitism, broke with people who embraced it, and wrote scathingly about the antisemitic movement of his day. And that’s when he was a man. After his breakdown in Turin and apotheosis into Dionysos while recuperating in an asylum he wrote numerous letters —often called the Wahnbriefe (“madness letters”)—  saying he was going to smite the antisemites with his newly acquired powers, and hit on Richard Wagner’s wife because of his former friend’s Jew-hatred. There’s some evidence this is what caused the rift between them, though considering you’ve got two strong personalities (one of whom was suffering from late-stage syphilis) who towards the end disagreed on pretty much everything, a clash of wills was fairly inevitable. I’ve previously written about all of this here. 

These aren’t merely academic disputes. Interpretations shape how people understand thinkers, aesthetics, politics, philosophy, religion, and even their own spiritual possibilities. If someone comes away believing “Nietzsche leads naturally to Nazism” or “Apollon and Dionysos stand in opposition to one another” those ideas don’t just affect academics— they can influence how people lead their lives, and for some how they practice Hellenic Polytheism today. 

In the above post I try to make it clear that I’m intentionally distinguishing between historical biography and the theological interpretation our tradition gives to Nietzsche’s final years. Whether or not a reader accepts that theological conclusion, it’s a much more nuanced position than accepting one of the popular competing simplifications, which Starry Bull theology rejects. Consider this dichotomy. 

On one side is the reductionist view:

The experience had a neurological or psychiatric basis; therefore it has no religious significance.

On the other is the absolutist view:

The experience was from God; therefore everything the person said or believed is infallible.

Instead our position distinguishes several questions that are often collapsed into one:

1. What happened physiologically?
2. What, if anything, was experienced?
3. How accurately was that experience interpreted?
4. What enduring fruit did it produce?

A neuroscientist may contribute to the first. A historian may help with the second and third. A theologian or spiritual practitioner may weigh the fourth. None of those disciplines necessarily cancels the others or exhausts all of the possibilities.

Even more important than these questions, however, is the proposition:

The message is what’s divine.

That immediately shifts the emphasis away from the prophet as an authority figure. The prophet becomes a conduit rather than the object of faith. If the conduit is cracked, the water may still be good. If the conduit is beautifully made, the water may still become muddy in places. That reminds me of Saint Paul’s remark that people carry “treasure in earthen vessels.” The value lies in the treasure, not in the vessel. Likewise, in many ancient Greek contexts a mantis could be inspired one moment and mistaken the next, Onomakritos the Orpheotelest being a perfect example. Divine inspiration was episodic, not a permanent state of omniscience.

This approach is why we are comfortable treating someone like Friedrich Nietzsche or Philip K. Dick as prophets without canonizing everything they wrote. That’s a significant distinction.

With Dick especially, Exegesis is almost a laboratory notebook. It isn’t a polished creed. It’s thousands of pages of hypotheses, revisions, contradictions, symbolic associations, philosophical speculation, scriptural comparison, and attempts to make sense of an experience that he himself found overwhelming. Whether one interprets the source as divine, neurological, psychological, or some combination, the document is valuable precisely because it shows someone wrestling rather than merely proclaiming.

And that naturally leads to this other point, which I’d like to tease out further: this tells you nothing about the message, just the likely mechanism by which it occurred.

Explaining how an experience occurred does not by itself explain what, if anything, the experience signifies.

Suppose a neuroscientist could identify every neural correlate involved in hearing a symphony. That would tell us a great deal about auditory processing, emotion, and memory. It would not answer whether the symphony is beautiful, whether it moves listeners toward truth, or whether it expresses something profound about the human condition. Those are different kinds of questions.

Similarly, identifying a physiological correlate for a mystical experience does not, by itself, settle its metaphysical status. It may explain part of the mechanism. It does not logically determine the meaning.

Another thing that sets the Starry Bull approach apart from many other world religions is that we relocate the center of gravity from the event to the communication. Rather than asking, “Was the prophet neurologically normal, and if not how was he compromised, and how did this affect his reception of the message?” the more important questions become: What was communicated? Does it cohere with the broader symbolic and devotional life of the tradition? Does it bear good fruit? Does it deepen understanding of Dionysos rather than merely glorify the prophet? Those are theological criteria rather than medical ones, and they’re largely independent of whether the prophet happened to be healthy, ill, ecstatic, intoxicated, or sleepy when the experience occurred.

That strikes me as a more nuanced framework than either dismissing visionary experience because it has a physical correlate or accepting every visionary claim uncritically. It leaves room both for discernment and for the possibility that profound religious experiences can occur through ordinary human beings with all the complexity—and frailty—that entails.

The story behind this image can be found here, here, and here.

Still more heroic are the blessings which Musaeus and his son bestow upon the righteous from the Gods. They conduct them into Haides, and lay them on couches, and establish a kind of symposium of saints, and set garlands on their heads, and make them live for ever in a state of intoxication, esteeming the fairest reward of virtue to be an eternity of drunkenness. […] But the most astounding of all these arguments concerns what they have to say about the Gods and virtue. They say that the Gods, too, assign misfortune and a bad life to many good people, and the opposite fate to their opposites. Begging priests and prophets frequent the doors of the rich and persuade them that they possess a God–given power founded on sacrifices and incantations. If the rich person or any of his ancestors has committed an injustice, they can fix it with pleasant things and feasts. Moreover, if he wishes to injure some enemy, then, at little expense, he’ll be able to harm just and unjust alike, for by means of spells and enchantments they can persuade the Gods to serve them. And they present a hubbub of books by Musaeus and Orpheus, offspring as they say of Selene and the Muses, according to which they arrange their rites, convincing not only individuals but also cities that liberation and purification from injustice is possible, both during life and after death, by means of sacrifices and enjoyable games to the deceased which free us from the evils of the beyond, whereas something horrible awaits those who have not celebrated sacrifices. (Plato, Republic 363c; 364a–365b)