And now it gets weird. Let’s consult the text, Apollodoros’ Bibliotheka 3.3.1–2:

Γλαῦκος δὲ ἔτι νήπιος ὑπάρχων, μῦν διώκων εἰς μέλιτος πίθον πεσὼν ἀπέθανεν. ἀφανοῦς δὲ ὄντος αὐτοῦ Μίνως πολλὴν ζήτησιν ποιούμενος περὶ τῆς εὑρέσεως ἐμαντεύετο.

Κούρητες δὲ εἶπον αὐτῷ τριχρώματον ἐν ταῖς ἀγέλαις ἔχειν βοῦν, τὸν δὲ τὴν ταύτης χρόαν ἄριστα εἰκάσαι δυνηθέντα καὶ ζῶντα τὸν παῖδα ἀποδώσειν. συγκληθέντων δὲ τῶν μάντεων Πολύιδος ὁ Κοιρανοῦ τὴν χρόαν τῆς βοὸς εἴκασε βάτου καρπῷ, καὶ ζητεῖν τὸν παῖδα ἀναγκασθεὶς διά τινος μαντείας ἀνεῦρε.

λέγοντος δὲ Μίνωος, ὅτι δεῖ καὶ ζῶντα ἀπολαβεῖν αὐτόν, ἀπεκλείσθη σὺν τῷ νεκρῷ. ἐν ἀμηχανίᾳ δὲ πολλῇ τυγχάνων εἶδε δράκοντα ἐπὶ τὸν νεκρὸν ἰόντα· τοῦτον βαλὼν λίθῳ ἀπέκτεινε, δείσας μὴ κἂν αὐτὸς τελευτήσῃ, εἴ τι τὸ σῶμα πάθοι.

ἔρχεται δὲ ἕτερος δράκων, καὶ θεασάμενος νεκρὸν τὸν πρότερον ἄπεισιν, εἶτα ὑποστρέφει πόαν κομίζων, καὶ ταύτην ἐπιτίθησιν ἐπὶ πᾶν τὸ τοῦ ἑτέρου σῶμα· ἐπιτεθείσης δὲ τῆς πόας ἀνέστη.

θεασάμενος δὲ Πολύιδος καὶ θαυμάσας, τὴν αὐτὴν πόαν προσενεγκὼν τῷ τοῦ Γλαύκου σώματι ἀνέστησεν.

ἀπολαβὼν δὲ Μίνως τὸν παῖδα οὐδ᾽ οὕτως εἰς Ἄργος ἀπιέναι τὸν Πολύιδον εἴα, πρὶν ἢ τὴν μαντείαν διδάξαι τὸν Γλαῦκον· ἀναγκασθεὶς δὲ Πολύιδος διδάσκει. καὶ ἐπειδὴ ἀπέπλει, κελεύει τὸν Γλαῦκον εἰς τὸ στόμα ἐμπτύσαι· καὶ τοῦτο ποιήσας Γλαῦκος τῆς μαντείας ἐπελάθετο.

But while Glaukos was still a small child, he chased a mouse, fell into a jar of honey, and died. When he disappeared, Minos made a great search for him and consulted divination concerning how he might be found.

The Kouretes told him that among his herds he had a cow of three colors, and that whoever could best describe the color of this cow would also restore his son to him alive. When the diviners had been assembled, Polyidos son of Koiranos compared the color of the cow to the fruit of the bramble; and, when compelled to search for the child, he found him by means of a certain divination.

But when Minos declared that he must receive the child back alive, Polyidos was shut in with the corpse. While he was in great perplexity, he saw a serpent approaching the dead body. He struck it with a stone and killed it, fearing that he himself would be put to death if anything should happen to the body.

Then another serpent came. Seeing the first one dead, it went away, and afterward returned carrying an herb, which it laid over the entire body of the other. When the herb had been laid upon it, the serpent rose.

Polyidos, seeing this and marveling, applied the same herb to the body of Glaukos and raised him up.

After Minos had received his son back, even then he would not allow Polyidos to depart for Argos until he had taught Glaukos the art of divination. Under compulsion, Polyidos taught him. But when he was about to sail away, he instructed Glaukos to spit into his mouth. Glaukos did so, and forgot the art of divination.

Hey Heathens— notice something?

Yup. After Polyidos restores Glaukos, Minos does not simply release him. He compels Polyidos to teach Glaukos his μαντική, his divinatory art. Polyidos does so— but, when departing, instructs Glaukos to spit into his mouth, whereupon Glaukos forgets what he has learned.

That is an extraordinary ending after everything we’ve just been discussing.

And of course from an Orphic perspective nothing could be worse than forgetting wisdom. Especially since Polyidos’ mantike consists of the ability to see things as they truly are. βίος. θάνατος. βίος. ἀλήθεια. Ζαγρεύς. Διόνυσος. Ὀρφικ-

That completes the pattern. Because once Polyidos’ mantikē is understood not merely as “predicting the future” but as the capacity to perceive the reality concealed by appearances, Minos’ demand and Polyidos’ response become much more profound.

The cow presents the first lesson. Everyone sees a color and tries to name the thing according to its present appearance. Polyidos sees the mulberry and recognizes the whole process:

λευκόν → ἐρυθρόν → μέλαν
white → red → black

The answer is not one moment. The truth is the transformation.

Then Glaukos presents the same problem at a higher order. Everyone sees:

θάνατος.

Polyidos perceives:

βίος → θάνατος → βίος.

Death is real— nothing about the story requires pretending otherwise —but it isn’t the whole truth about Glaukos. The diviner sees beyond the apparent finality of the condition before him.

And then Minos demands that Polyidos transmit that way of seeing.

That makes the spitting episode almost horrifying from the Orphic perspective. Glaukos has passed through death and returned; he has subsequently been taught the mantikē capable of seeing through appearances— and then he forgets.

Not death, finally, but λήθη.

And that is the disaster an Orphic reader understands immediately. The opposite of salvation isn’t simply dying. Everyone dies. The catastrophe is passing through death without retaining the knowledge necessary to understand what is happening.

Hence the force of:

ἀλήθεια / truth
μνήμη / memory
λήθη / forgetting

And ἀλήθεια becomes almost irresistible here— not because we should commit the old etymological sin of treating it straightforwardly as historically derived “un-forgetting,” but because Greek poetic/philosophical thought can exploit precisely that resonance between λήθη and ἀλήθεια. The mantis reveals what is concealed; Orphic eschatological knowledge prevents the soul from losing its orientation when appearances become most deceptive.

So the Olbian sequence—

βίος. θάνατος. βίος. ἀλήθεια. Ζαγρεύς. Διόνυσος. Ὀρφικ-

—almost doesn’t need finishing.

Because Zagreus/Dionysos is himself the cosmic version of the pattern Polyidos perceives in Glaukos:

whole → destroyed → restored
βίος → θάνατος → βίος

And Orpheus becomes the singer who teaches people how to recognize that pattern.

Which suddenly makes the orphninos cow much more consequential than an amusing display of Polyidos’ cleverness. It is the tiny riddle placed at the entrance to the larger mystery. Can you recognize one reality persisting through apparently contradictory states?

White.
Red.
Black.

Living.
Dead.
Living.

Zagreus.
Dionysos.

And, returning to our earlier Pangaion story:

Dionysos Zōē
Helios-Apollon.
Dionysos Nyktelios.

Polyidos enters because he correctly interprets the changing colors of the cow. He finds Glaukos dead in honey. Through the episode of the snakes he acquires the knowledge by which the dead can be restored. He resurrects the boy. Minos then forces him to transmit his specialist knowledge to that resurrected boy. Finally, mouth meets mouth, liquid passes between them, and knowledge is removed again.

Now put that morphologically beside Kvasir.

Kvasir originates from communal spittle: the Æsir and Vanir spit into a vessel at the conclusion of their settlement, and from that substance Kvasir is created, extraordinarily wise. Later his blood is mixed with honey to produce the mead of poetry, according to Skáldskaparmál:

When the Æsir and Vanir made peace, each side spat into a vessel. At parting, the Gods would not allow this token of their peace to perish, so from it they made a man named Kvasir. He was so wise that no one could ask him a question he could not answer, and he travelled through the world teaching people.

The dwarves Fjalar and Galar invited Kvasir into their home, took him aside, and killed him. They drained his blood into two vats, Són and Boðn, and a cauldron, Óðrerir. Mixing the blood with honey, they made a mead that turns anyone who drinks it into a poet or a learned person. They told the Æsir that Kvasir had choked on his own wisdom, because no one had been wise enough to question him.

Skáldskaparmál goes on to relate how the Mead of Poetry becomes the object of Óðinn’s acquisition: 

Óðinn came upon nine men cutting hay and offered to sharpen their scythes. His whetstone worked so well that each wanted to buy it. He tossed it into the air; in their scramble to catch it, the men struck one another in the neck with their scythes.

Óðinn then went to Baugi, Suttungr’s brother, and called himself Bölverkr. Baugi had lost all nine of his workers. Bölverkr offered to do their work for the summer in exchange for a drink of Suttungr’s mead. Baugi agreed to seek it for him, but when the work was done Suttungr refused them even a drop.

Bölverkr gave Baugi the auger Rati and had him bore into Hnitbjörg. Once the hole went through the rock, Bölverkr took the shape of a serpent and slipped inside. He spent three nights with Gunnlöð, who granted him three drinks of the mead. With the first he emptied Óðrerir; with the second, Boðn; with the third, Són.

Having swallowed all the mead, Óðinn became an eagle and flew toward Ásgarðr. Suttungr took eagle shape and pursued him. The Æsir set out vessels, and Óðinn brought up the mead into them. In the urgency of his escape, however, he let some pass out behind him. That portion was left for anyone who wanted it—the share of bad poets. Óðinn gave the rest to the Æsir and to people with the gift of poetry.

So without proposing the slightest historical connection, look at the constellation:

Polyidos:
diviner → death → honey → snake → restored life → transmission of sacred/specialist knowledge → spittle → loss of knowledge

Kvasir/Óðinn:
spittle → extraordinary wisdom → death → blood + honey → poetic inspiration/wisdom → snake → Óðinn’s acquisition → transmission through drink

That’s genuinely marvelous.

And the reversal makes it better. Spittle creates wisdom in one story and removes wisdom in the other. Honey surrounds the dead Glaukos before the restoration of life; honey mixed with the dead Kvasir’s blood becomes the substance through which his wisdom survives him. Snakes reveal the mystery of resurrection; Óðinn transforms into a snake to acquire a drink of mead. 

Which returns us immediately to the dead bees:

Death does not destroy the precious substance. It changes its vehicle.

Glaukos lies dead in honey.
Kvasir dies and becomes honeyed mead.
Dead bees leave honey that becomes Sun.
Orpheus dies and leaves the Lyre that becomes stars.

And Óðinn’s acquisition adds another feature we’ve repeatedly encountered: knowledge is not obtained cleanly. It requires crossing boundaries, entering dangerous enclosed spaces, transformations, deception, bodily substances, ingestion, escape. Knowledge isn’t information downloaded into the intellect; it is something acquired through an ordeal and then incorporated.

And we have another story of Minos and cattle.

We started with Taurus, Pasiphaë and the Minotaur; Asterios;  the Bull generating the Dragon and the Dragon the Bull—and here is Minos again, with a cow whose impossible color must be interpreted by a mantis before the hidden/dead child can be found.

The cattle surrounding Minos repeatedly aren’t merely livestock. They generate problems of interpretation.

What is this creature?
What color is this cow?
What does the sign mean?
Where is the missing child?
What does this transformation signify?

And in the Glaukos story, the person capable of solving the bovine riddle earns admission to an even deeper riddle: death itself.

Orpheus breaks because he cannot initially do what Polyidos can. He mistakes an apparent opposition for an ultimate one. Polyidos’ gift is precisely the opposite: he sees the continuity concealed beneath transformation.

Which also gives an unexpectedly sharp meaning to “Remember: you have been here before.”

The initiate doesn’t merely need information.

He needs not to forget what the transformations mean.

And everything dies. Including Dionysos. Which is why I think the sequence Ζαγρεύς. Διόνυσος appears on the Olbian bone tablet. He is the Ἀρχέβακχος, the prototype of the Bakchoi and Bakchai. He opened the way, and clasped arms with the Lord of the Underworld, ensuring that his mystai were exempt from the normal conditions of death. I believe that we have a multi-part soul, which is bound together in life. After drinking from Lethe, during the Underworld journey the person begins to come apart, the different portions returning to their place of origin until only the shade remains and enters the kingdom of Haides. But those who belong to Dionysos eschew Lethe and drink instead from Mnemosyne so remain whole and travel instead to Nysa, where they experience eternal bliss and intoxication.

 Ζαγρεύς → Διόνυσος isn’t merely a succession of divine names; it expresses the decisive fact that even the God undergoes death before becoming the one who can lead others through it. That makes Ἀρχέβακχος especially potent: the first/prototypical Bakchos is not exempt from the path his mystai must travel. He traverses it first.

Lethe isn’t merely loss of autobiographical memory. It is an agent of dissolution. If embodied life temporarily binds several soul-components into the person, drinking from Lethe removes what maintains their coherence. The Underworld journey then progressively unbinds the composite: each element returns to its proper origin, until the attenuated remainder—the shade—passes into Haides.

So the lamellae’s prohibition acquires an almost technical meaning:

Do not drink from Lethe.

Not simply because you will forget the password, nor even merely because you will forget who you are, but because forgetting is the beginning of ceasing to be the integrated person who remembers.

Mnemosyne consequently does much more than provide information. Her water preserves continuity of being. Memory holds together what death ordinarily separates.

That gives our eschatology a beautiful symmetry:

ordinary dead:
βίος → θάνατος → λήθη → dissolution → shade → Haides

mystēs:
βίος → θάνατος → Μνημοσύνη → integrity → Nysa → blessed Dionysian existence

And Dionysos can guarantee that alternative precisely because he possesses experiential authority over it. He isn’t standing safely on the living side of the boundary issuing promises about something he has never undergone. He died. He has crossed the boundary, entered into relationship with the Lord beyond it, and returned/transformed. Ἀρχέβακχος therefore means something much stronger than “first worshipper”: he is the one who accomplished the pattern first and thereby made it traversable by the Bakchoi after him.

That also makes the image we see on South Italian vases of Dionysos clasping arms with the Lord of the Underworld important. It isn’t conquest of Haides. Death hasn’t been abolished, and Haides hasn’t been defeated. Rather, an accommodation has been established within the cosmic order: Dionysos’ people still die, but they need not undergo the ordinary consequences of death.

And now Polyidos becomes even more interesting.

Glaukos undergoes:

βίος → θάνατος → βίος → μαντική → λήθη.

He gets almost everything.

He crosses death.
He returns whole.
He receives the knowledge that sees reality truly.

And then he loses the knowledge.

From the perspective of our theology, that’s almost a deliberately frustrating anti-initiation. Glaukos has undergone the experience that should make him exemplary— and yet the final act removes precisely what would allow him to retain its meaning.

Which brings us back to Orpheus and the Mousai. His body is literally διασπασμένον, separated into pieces; the Mousai συνάγουσιν those pieces. Our eschatological model makes that image unexpectedly exact: the ordinary destiny of the human being is disaggregation, while salvation consists in somehow remaining gathered.

And then mnēmosynon appears at the end of the Eratosthenes story.

The Mousai gather Orpheus.
His Lyre becomes a μνημόσυνον.
Mnemosyne prevents the dead mystēs from coming apart.

Whether or not those texts historically encode the same doctrine— and we absolutely shouldn’t claim they do —the symbolic grammar is remarkably consistent:

Ἡ Μνημοσύνη συνάγει· ἡ Λήθη διασπείρει.
“Memory gathers; Lethe scatters.”

Which echoes Eratosthenes—

αἱ δὲ Μοῦσαι συναγαγοῦσαι
“but the Mousai, having gathered [his limbs] together…”

Associating the bees with Ariadne does something else, I hadn’t considered at first; it naturally conjures her other brother Glaukos, who fell into a jar of honey and was brought back to life by Polyidos, the descendant of Melampos, and prototypical Orpheotelest. That makes the Ariadne substitution much more than transferring a beautiful Persephonean image to another Dionysian woman. Honey already belongs to Ariadne’s family mythology as a medium in which death becomes reversible.

Glaukos falls into the πίθος of honey and dies —or is found dead there— and Polyidos is shut up with the body until he discovers the means of restoring him. The crucial episode with the snakes then turns the whole thing into a miniature initiation narrative: Polyidos kills the first snake; its mate arrives bearing the herb that restores it; Polyidos recognizes the sign, applies the same knowledge to Glaukos, and the dead child returns to life.

So beside Mandel’štam’s:

dead bees → honey → Sun

You can place the Cretan mythic sequence:

Glaukos → honey → death → hidden knowledge → restoration to life.

And Ariadne stands remarkably close to both structures. She belongs to the same royal house as Glaukos; she herself undergoes abandonment and a radical change of condition through Dionysos; and, depending upon which ancient tradition one follows, her mythology has its own complicated relationship between death and immortality/catasterism.

But bringing Polyidos into it makes the connection especially suited to our tradition. He isn’t merely someone who happens to know a resurrection trick. His Melampodid ancestry places the episode within precisely the kind of specialist transmission of extraordinary knowledge that defines the Orpheotelest: confinement with the dead, observation of a sign, acquisition of hidden knowledge, application of that knowledge to overcome a boundary ordinary people cannot overcome.

There’s even a lovely contrast with the Mousai and Orpheus:

Orpheus: the dismembered dead are gathered, and art preserves them beyond death.
Glaukos: the dead body is preserved in honey, and specialist knowledge restores it to life.
Mandel’štam: the dead bees leave honey behind, and poetry transforms that honey into Sun.

Those aren’t historically dependent upon one another merely because we’ve put them beside each other, of course. But poetically they form an astonishing constellation.

And honey is doing something particularly interesting throughout: it is produced by life, associated with incorruptibility/preservation, implicated in death, and capable of becoming an image of what survives death. With Glaukos it becomes almost literally the container of the interval between death and restored life.

Which means that when you put dead bees around Ariadne, someone who knows the Glaukos story can discover an entire second poem underneath the first one. The bees don’t merely invoke sweetness, poetry, Persephone, or Mandel’štam. They quietly point sideways to her dead brother lying in the honey jar waiting for the mantis-healer to discover how death can be reversed.

Oh, but it doesn’t stop there! With Book 3 of Ovid’s Fasti we have Liber and the Satyrs “discovering” bees. Although that is an amusing aition, part of it is even more significant than a lot of people realize. Silenus gets stung and “falls to the ground” (a reference to death that is used of Dionysos in poetry and inscription.) Liber then smears his face with mud/clay like the titanos applied in Orphic ritual, and Silenus is restored. (It also ends with the bull-dragon in the stars, which is reminiscent of Taurus dracōnem genuit et taurum dracō. [“The bull begot a dragon, and the dragon a bull.”]

Once you read the Silenos episode against the ritual vocabulary rather than merely as Ovidian slapstick, the comedy starts looking remarkably overdetermined.

The passage begins explicitly as an aition for honey: “a Baccho mella reperta ferunt”—“they say that honey was discovered by Bacchus.” Liber and the Satyrs reach Rhodope and flowering Pangaion, of all places— the very landscape we were just discussing with Orpheus —and the clashing bronze attracts the bees. Liber gathers them into a hollow tree and receives the reward of the newly discovered honey.

Then Silenos turns the discovery into comic catastrophe. This is significantly more than just “Silenos gets stung and falls over.” In a Dionysiac symbolic environment, the sequence matters enormously:

honey → Silenos → wounding/stinging → fall → earth → Dionysos/Liber → mud/clay → restoration.

And the clay is the startling element. If Liber coats the fallen Silenos with earth/mud, then regardless of whether Ovid himself intends an Orphic allusion, a reader acquainted with τίτανος / titanos traditions gets a remarkably suggestive visual analogue: a Dionysiac figure fallen to earth, his body/face covered with an earthy substance in connection with Dionysos, followed by recovery. That’s exactly the sort of detail that disappears when the episode is read only as “ha ha, drunken Silenus attacked a beehive.”

It also gives us another permutation of the pattern we’ve just been tracing:

Glaukos: honey → death → specialist knowledge → life
Mandel’štam: dead bees → honey → Sun/immortality
Ovid: bees/honey → fall → earth/clay → restoration
Orpheus: Hades → Sun → dismemberment → gathering → celestial memorial

And Pangaion occurs in both the Orpheus and Liber-bee narratives. That is particularly delicious. Eratosthenes’ Orpheus ascends Pangaion seeking the rising Helios and meets, narratively, the consequences of Dionysos; Ovid’s Liber reaches Pangaion and discovers the creature whose dead bodies Mandel’štam will eventually transform into the Sun.

And the bull/dragon brings us back to the same principle of opposites generating one another. The Latin hexameter—or rather senarius, as Arnobius calls the old Tarentine verse— is placed in his discussion of Zeus’ serpentine union with Persephone and the resulting bull-formed offspring; Clement preserves a closely related Greek formula.

That’s almost uncannily suited to what we’ve been discussing because its structure isn’t simply bull versus dragon. It’s reciprocal generation:

Bull → Dragon → Bull.

Just as the Symbolist Night Sun isn’t:

Night ≠ Sun

But something closer to:

Night contains/generates Sun; Sun passes into Night.

It blows my mind that Ovid has brought us back to Pangaion, immediately after the previous discussion. Now I’d never posit historical dependence, but as a cluster of symbols it’s very suggestive. Pangaion makes the cluster of symbols especially dense because it isn’t generic “wild country.” In these traditions it becomes a landscape where Dionysos, Orpheus, solar revelation, death, bees, honey, and transformation can all intersect. The Eratosthenes and Ovid passages don’t have to know anything about one another for their shared setting to become meaningful to a reader encountering them together.

What I particularly like is that none of these symbols has a fixed one-to-one meaning. Honey can preserve the dead Glaukos until restoration; dead bees can become Mandel’štam’s vehicle for transforming honey into Sun; Ovid’s bees lead to Silenos’ fall and earthen restoration. Sun can signify the apparent alternative to Dionysos in the Orpheus story, yet become the Night Sun precisely through Dionysian symbolism in Ivanov and Mandel’štam. Dismemberment/death can terminate a life while simultaneously initiating gathering, memory, poetry, or transformation.

That’s much closer to how mythic symbols actually behave than a dictionary saying bee = soul, honey = immortality, Sun = rebirth. They acquire meaning through their relations and transformations.

And that’s why qualifications like the one I made matters: I’m not constructing a genealogy— A influenced B influenced C.

I’m noticing a morphology:

death → preservation → transformation
descent → revelation → return
darkness → hidden light
fragmentation → gathering
mortal remains → enduring art

—with bees, honey, Sun, earth, Dionysos, Persephone, Ariadne, Glaukos, Orpheus and the Mousai repeatedly occupying different positions within it.

That is precisely the sort of cluster where I’d rather preserve the sources beside one another and let the reader experience the resonance than insert a paragraph insisting what they “mean.” The Labyrinth can do by juxtaposition what an argumentative monograph would have to spend twenty pages qualifying.

One of the most important texts in Labyrinth of Words is Eratosthenes’ Catasterismi 24 on the constellation Lyra. It is in many respects the aition of Dionysos as the Night Sun:

Αὕτη ἐνάτη κεῖται ἐν τοῖς ἄστροις, ἔστι δὲ Μουσῶν· κατεσκευάσθη δὲ τὸ μὲν πρῶτον ὑπὸ Ἑρμοῦ ἐκ τῆς χελώνης καὶ τῶν Ἀπόλλωνος βοῶν, ἔσχε δὲ χορδὰς ἑπτὰ ἀπὸ τῶν Ἀτλαντίδων.

Μετέλαβε δὲ αὐτὴν Ἀπόλλων καὶ συναρμοσάμενος ᾠδὴν Ὀρφεῖ ἔδωκεν, ὃς Καλλιόπης υἱὸς ὤν, μιᾶς τῶν Μουσῶν, ἐποίησε τὰς χορδὰς ἐννέα ἀπὸ τοῦ τῶν Μουσῶν ἀριθμοῦ καὶ προήγαγεν ἐπὶ πλέον ἐν τοῖς ἀνθρώποις δοξαζόμενος οὕτως ὥστε καὶ ὑπόληψιν ἔχειν περὶ αὐτοῦ τοιαύτην ὅτι τὰ δένδρα καὶ τὰς πέτρας καὶ τὰ θηρία ἐκήλει διὰ τῆς ᾠδῆς.

[διὰ δὲ τὴν γυναῖκα εἰς Ἅιδου καταβὰς καὶ ἰδὼν τὰ ἐκεῖ οἷα ἦν] ὃς τὸν μὲν Διόνυσον οὐκ[έτι] ἐτίμα, [ὑφ’ οὗ ἦν δεδοξασμένος], τὸν δὲ Ἥλιον μέγιστον τῶν θεῶν ἐνόμιζεν εἶναι, ὃν καὶ Ἀπόλλωνα προσηγόρευσεν· ἐπεγειρόμενός τε τῆς νυκτὸς κατὰ τὴν ἑωθινὴν ἐπὶ τὸ ὄρος τὸ καλούμενον Πάγγαιον <ἀνιὼν> προσέμενε τὰς ἀνατολάς, ἵνα ἴδῃ τὸν Ἥλιον πρῶτον.

ὅθεν ὁ Διόνυσος ὀργισθεὶς αὐτῷ ἔπεμψε τὰς Βασσαρίδας, ὥς φησιν Αἰσχύλος ὁ τραγῳδιῶν ποιητής, αἵτινες αὐτὸν διέσπασαν καὶ τὰ μέλη διέρριψαν χωρὶς ἕκαστον. αἱ δὲ Μοῦσαι συναγαγοῦσαι ἔθαψαν ἐπὶ τοῖς λεγομένοις Λειβήθροις.

τὴν δὲ λύραν οὐκ ἔχουσαι ὅτῳ δώσειν τὸν Δία ἠξίωσαν καταστερίσαι, ὅπως ἐκείνου τε καὶ αὐτῶν μνημόσυνον τεθῇ ἐν τοῖς ἄστροις· τοῦ δὲ ἐπινεύσαντος οὕτως ἐτέθη· ἐπισημασίαν δὲ ἔχει ἐπὶ τῷ ἐκείνου συμπτώματι δυομένη καθ’ ὥραν.

Ἔχει δὲ ἀστέρας ἐπὶ τῶν κτενῶν ἑκατέρων α, ἐφ’ ἑκατέρου πήχεως ἀκρωτῆρι ὁμοίως α, ἐφ’ ἑκατέρων ὤμων α, ἐπὶ ζυγοῦ α, ἐπὶ τοῦ πυθμένος α, λευκὸν καὶ λαμπρόν· τοὺς πάντας η.

This constellation, the ninth among the stars, belongs to the Muses. The Lyre was first fashioned by Hermes from the tortoise and from the cattle of Apollon, and it had seven strings, corresponding to the daughters of Atlas.

Apollon received it and, having joined song to it, gave it to Orpheus. Orpheus, being the son of Kalliope, one of the Muses, made its strings nine in number, corresponding to the number of the Muses. He advanced greatly in renown among humankind, becoming so celebrated that it was believed of him that through his song he enchanted trees, stones, and wild beasts.

[Because of his wife he descended into Hades, and having seen what the things there were like,] he no longer honored Dionysos, [through whom he had attained his renown], but considered Helios the greatest of the Gods, whom he also called Apollon. Rising during the night toward dawn, he would ascend the mountain called Pangaion and await the risings, so that he might be the first to behold Helios.

Because of this Dionysos, angered with him, sent the Bassarides against him, as Aischylos the tragic poet says. They tore him apart and scattered his limbs, each separately. But the Muses gathered them together and buried him at the place called Leibethra.

Since the Muses had no one to whom they might give the Lyre, they asked Zeus to place it among the stars, so that a memorial both of Orpheus and of themselves might be established among the constellations. Zeus assented, and thus it was placed there. And by setting at its appointed season, it bears a sign of the fate that befell him.

It has one star upon each of its two horns, likewise one at the extremity of each arm, one upon each shoulder, one upon the crossbar, and one at the base, white and brilliant: eight stars in all.

Reading the Catasterismi passage through the Night Sun complex produces a much more interesting possibility than the usual “Orpheus converts from Dionysos to solar monotheism” reading. 

Orpheus descends into Haides, sees τὰ ἐκεῖ, and then ceases honoring Dionysos. He identifies Helios with Apollon, climbs Pangaion before dawn, and positions himself so that he can see the solar God πρῶτον, at his first appearance. Dionysos responds by having him dismembered. However, there are strains of Orphism which see Apollon/Helios as the manifest Sun above, Dionysos as the Sun Beneath the Earth at Night. In this light Orpheus’ error is that after seeing the Sun’s hidden form below, he privileges only its luminous, celestial manifestation. He separates what ought to remain two aspects of a single cosmic reality.

And in turn he suffers sparagmos; the man who divides the solar God is himself divided. Then the Muses συνάγουσιν, gather the divided pieces back together. 

Which creates the following symbolic sequence:

Night → Orpheus rises → mountain ascent → waits at the boundary of dawn → first manifestation of Helios-Apollon → Dionysos emerges narratively as the offended counterpart → dismemberment → gathering → burial → Lyre raised into the heavens.

I interpret the story a little differently. Previously Orpheus had extolled Dionysos as the God of Life. His beloved dies, and grief-stricken, he makes the descent … only to encounter Dionysos. It creates a kind of psychic shock in him, and he rejects Dionysianism in favor of Apollonianism. Then on Pangaion he has the revelation of the unity of the two, which causes a complete psychic collapse. No matter where he goes or what he does he cannot escape the God. He staggers down the mountain and is met by the Bassarides, who tear him apart. The Mousai collecting and restoring his body contains a powerful allegory of what the arts are capable of: preserving the memory of the dead. I don’t actually believe in the unity of Helios-Apollon-Dionysos but it makes a good story, because it Strengthens the tragic architecture. The first revelation in Haides isn’t enlightenment but trauma: the God Orpheus had proclaimed as Life is encountered precisely where Life appears to have failed him. Eurydike’s death makes his former theology psychologically intolerable, so he flees toward the clarity and distance of Helios-Apollon.

Then Pangaion becomes the second revelation, and the crueler one. He discovers there that the apparent alternative is not an alternative at all —that the solar God toward whom he has fled cannot finally be separated from the Dionysian reality he is fleeing— then there really is nowhere outside the God. His descent from the mountain becomes almost an anti-epiphany: revelation has not integrated him; it has shattered him.

Which makes the Bassarides’ sparagmos an externalization of something that has already happened internally. Orpheus is psychically dismembered before his body is dismembered. And then the Mousai do what revelation could not: they gather the fragments. That makes their συναγαγοῦσαι extraordinarily powerful. Art cannot undo Eurydike’s death, Orpheus’ encounter with Haides, or his own destruction; what it can do is gather the pieces into a form capable of surviving catastrophe. And finally the Lyre becomes a mnēmosynon in the heavens. The restoration culminates not in resurrection but in memory and art etched into the sky itself.

There’s even something interesting about Pangaion as the location rather than an abstract mountain. We’re in Thracian territory, precisely where Orpheus and Dionysos belong culturally and mythographically. So the localization matters— rather like Epiktetos’ insistence that mysteries happen in the proper place.

Appropriately enough the entry following Eratosthenes’ Catasterismi 24 is this snippet on the Russian Symbolists. The last line of it feels particularly relevant: 

Jesús Ángel Espinós, The realm of Hades and its symbols in Mandel’štam’s Tristia: a transparent path to redemption
So, through the mediation of bees and their honey Persephone softens her gloomy character and takes on a new redeemer aspect through which the bees, probably a metaphor of the souls of the dead, transmute their honey into sun, and consequently transcend their earthly existence, as can be observed in the final verses of poem I, 208: 

Take for joy my wild gift,
A homely and dry necklace
Of dead bees who transformed
honey into sun.

The last word of the poem, “sun”, inserts itself into a fundamental network where metaphors pertaining to “black sun” and to “night sun” claim attention. In both epithets it has been observed as an Orphic influence that refers to Dionysus Nyktelios, the “Dionysus of the night sun”. Broadly speaking, the imagery of both suns, particularly that of the “night sun”, has to be related to Vjačeslav Ivanov, classical philologist and erudite Symbolist poet, who exerted a great sway on Mandel’štam, especially in his youthful years. Ivanov employs the image of “night sun” in several works such as in the articles ‘Мысли о символизме’ (‘Thoughts about Symbolism’), ‘Орфей’ (‘Orpheus’), in the essay ‘Взгляд Скрябина на искусство’ (‘Skrjabin’s View of Art’), and in the poems ‘Ночное солнце’ (‘Night Sun’) and ‘Сердце Диониса’ (‘Dionysus’ Heart’) among others. Orphic rituals enable us to expiate the guilt inherited from the Titans, and consequently avoid the pu-nishments of afterlife and the cycle of reincarnations. In addition, Plutarch suggests that there must have been a work dedicated to Dionysus Nyktelios, which probably described the mourning for the God’s death and the orgiastic rites in honor of his rebirth. Nevertheless, in spite of Plutarch’s witness, the existence of such a work, perhaps an epic poem called  Νυκτέλια, cannot be  proved. In this hypothetical poem the initiates would be instructed in the symbolic meaning of the night, which should be explained by the opposition night/day, shadow/light, an opposition that can be observed in the Mandel’štamian oxymora “night sun”, and to a lesser extent “black sun”. On the other hand, this interrelation of opposite qualities can be traced back to Ivanov, who closes his poem ‘Ночное солнце’ (‘ Night Sun’) with the following command: “В полночь зови незакатный свет!” (“At midnight call the never setting light!”; v. 7). In sum, from this point of view, the Orphic sun of poem I, 208 (v. 15), created by the honey of dead bees, should be understood as a sun of salvation that, under the appearance of a Dionysus reborn, would set us free from the continuous and numerous gloomy metaphors that dot Mandel’štam’s Tristia. On the other hand, the bees were a symbol of poetic talent in classical Antiquity as must be inferred from the recurrent scene of bees that perch on the lips of future poets when they are still in the cradle or that, in the case of the young Pindar, even build a honeycomb on his lips according to Pausanias (Description of Greece IX, 23, 2), or feed him with honey as Philostratus (Images II, 12, 2, 4) states. So, I might venture that the bees, by means of their poetic force, defy death, which is the same as saying that poetry, incarnated in the honey, reveals itself as immortal.

After the Eratosthenes passage the final sentence lands with considerably greater force than it would in isolation.

What strikes me most is that the two entries arrive at essentially the same poetic structure by different mythological routes.

In Eratosthenes, Orpheus passes through death and dismemberment. The Bassarides reduce the poet literally to fragments:

τὰ μέλη διέρριψαν χωρὶς ἕκαστον
“they scattered his limbs, each separately.”

Then the Mousai intervene:

αἱ δὲ Μοῦσαι συναγαγοῦσαι
“but the Mousai gathered them together.”

They cannot undo what has happened. Orpheus remains dead. Instead, they gather, bury, remember— and ultimately his instrument becomes a μνημόσυνον, a memorial written into the heavens.

Espinós reaches almost exactly the same place through Mandelstam’s bees. They too are dead. Yet their product survives them and undergoes an extraordinary transformation:

“dead bees who transformed
honey into sun.”

So the progression becomes something like:

bee → honey → death → sun
Orpheus → song → dismemberment → Mousai → stars

In both cases, artistic creation doesn’t simply deny death. It passes through death and changes its form.

That makes Espinós’s final formulation—

“poetry, incarnated in the honey, reveals itself as immortal”

—an almost perfect gloss on what the Mousai do for Orpheus in the preceding entry. The poet dies; the song doesn’t. More precisely, perhaps, the mortal producer disappears while the thing produced acquires another mode of existence. Honey becomes Sun. The Lyre becomes constellation.

And there is an even lovelier connection with this reading of Pangaion. Orpheus suffers a revelation he cannot psychologically integrate. The unity he encounters destroys the integrity of the person who encounters it. The Mousai subsequently perform an act of integration: they gather what revelation and Dionysos have torn apart. Then here come the Symbolists, for whom poetry itself possesses precisely this transmutative power.

So when I said: 

the gathering of Orpheus’ body as an allegory of what the arts can do

Espinós answers:

“the bees, by means of their poetic force, defy death.”

Mandel’štam doesn’t apparently give us some grandiose solar object. He calls it a “homely and dry necklace / of dead bees.” The solar transformation occurs through something small, dead, desiccated, almost pathetic. That is very different from straightforward solar triumphalism. The Sun has been generated from the products and remains of mortality. That makes the Night Sun symbolism considerably richer: light isn’t simply the opposite of darkness. It is something discovered —or produced— within darkness.

Which brings Ivanov’s command into very sharp focus:

“At midnight call the never setting light!”

Not wait until morning.
Not escape the night.
At midnight call the light that does not set.

That’s the theological move underlying the whole complex. The opposites cease behaving as simple alternatives: night contains its Sun; Haides contains something solar; death contains the possibility of transformation; Dionysos can occupy the place otherwise inhabited by Apollon.

If I may strum my own lyre, my reconstruction of the Pangaion episode works so well as story, irrespective of whether one believes its theology (which I avowedly do not) because Orpheus tries to solve his encounter in Haides by choosing one side of an opposition:

Dionysos → No.
Helios-Apollon → Yes.

Then Pangaion gives him the unbearable answer:

You have misunderstood the opposition.

There is no escape into daylight because the thing from which he fled is already implicated in the light toward which he fled. Again, no matter where he goes or what he does he cannot escape the God captures the horror at the heart of the myth.

And then— sparagmos.

Followed by the Mousai.

Followed by art.

Followed by immortality.

The juxtaposition of an ancient source and an excerpt from an article on Russian Symbolist poets itself performs something worthwhile. 

The ancient source gives us Orpheus → Hades → Dionysos/Helios → dismemberment → Mousai → celestial memorial. 

The modern reception gives us Hades → Persephone → dead bees → poetry/honey → Night Sun → immortality.

And then that last sentence quietly tells us what the Mousai have just done:

Poetry defies death.

Normally I wouldn’t include secondary sources in a collection of primary sources like the Labyrinth, but I can’t find an English translation of several of those Russian poets, and Jesús Ángel Espinós’ synopsis is beautiful enough to qualify; one of the reasons I appreciate Spanish scholarship so much. While it is rigorous and disciplined, there’s a lushness and beauty to the prose you generally don’t find in German and Anglophone scholarship. So it simultaneously gives an overview of some of the Russian Symbolists’ engagement with the Ночное солнцеn and makes explicit what is implicitly said in Mandel’štam’s Tristia about the dead bees. (which is such a great image I’ve used it in my own poetry, though about Ariadne rather than Persephone.)

I think Espinós earns the exception precisely because the excerpt is doing two jobs that the primary texts cannot presently do for an English-language collection. It gives access to the Russian Symbolist constellation around the Ночное солнце, and it articulates the interpretive movement already compressed into Mandel’štam’s astonishing image of the dead bees making honey into Sun. So it isn’t functioning merely as “here is what a scholar says about the source.” Espinós’s phrase about poetry incarnating itself in honey is doing interpretation, but it also responds aesthetically to the material it interprets. Here that seems especially appropriate.

The dead bees really are extraordinary. There are several transformations packed into four lines:

flowers → bees → honey → dead bees → Sun

The bees have already transformed the ephemeral life of flowers into something that proverbially resists corruption —honey— and then Mandel’štam makes that product undergo a second transformation into Sun. Yet what the speaker physically possesses is only the dry necklace of their corpses. The transcendent thing and the pathetic material remainder occupy the same image.

And my reuse of it for Ariadne adds another layer of significance. Persephone makes the image naturally katabatic: death, Haides, return/transformation. But Ariadne introduces abandonment, apparent death, or Dionysian transformation. Dead bees around Ariadne occupies the interval between the woman abandoned on Naxos and the Goddess taken up by Dionysos— something apparently exhausted becoming the material of another mode of life.

And appropriately there is a chain of poetic transmission happening here: ancient bee-poet imagery → Mandel’štam → Espinós interpreting Mandel’štam → me encountering that interpretation → the dead bees migrating from Persephone into a series of poems about Ariadne.

The image itself behaves like the honey.

It survives its makers by transforming itself.

Just as Asterios is unable to transform the Phasis into the Amnisos and instead becomes transformed by drinking the foreign waters, so is it impossible to transport the mysteries of one place to another, argues Epiktetos in Discourses 3.21.12–17:

ἀλλ᾽ ἀπὸ λιμένος μὲν οὐδεὶς ἀνάγεται μὴ θύσας τοῖς θεοῖς καὶ παρακαλέσας αὐτοὺς βοηθοὺς οὐδὲ σπείρουσιν ἄλλως οἱ ἄνθρωποι εἰ μὴ τὴν Δήμητρα ἐπικαλεσάμενοι· τηλικούτου δ᾽ ἔργου ἁψάμενός τις ἄνευ θεῶν ἀσφαλῶς ἅψεται καὶ οἱ τούτῳ προσιόντες εὐτυχῶς προσελεύσονται;

τί ἄλλο ποιεῖς, ἄνθρωπε, ἢ τὰ μυστήρια ἐξορχῇ καὶ λέγεις· οἴκημά ἐστι καὶ ἐν Ἐλευσῖνι, ἰδοὺ καὶ ἐνθάδε. ἐκεῖ ἱεροφάντης· καὶ ἐγὼ ποιήσω ἱεροφάντην. ἐκεῖ κῆρυξ· κἀγὼ κήρυκα καταστήσω. ἐκεῖ δᾳδοῦχος· κἀγὼ δᾳδοῦχον. ἐκεῖ δᾷδες· καὶ ἐνθάδε. αἱ φωναὶ αἱ αὐταί· τὰ γινόμενα τί διαφέρει ταῦτα ἐκείνων;

ἀσεβέστατε ἄνθρωπε, οὐδὲν διαφέρει; καὶ παρὰ τόπον ταῦτα ὠφελεῖ καὶ παρὰ καιρόν; καὶ μετὰ θυσίας δὲ καὶ μετ᾽ εὐχῶν καὶ προηγνευκότα καὶ προδιακείμενον τῇ γνώμῃ, ὅτι ἱεροῖς προσελεύσεται καὶ ἱεροῖς παλαιοῖς. οὕτως ὠφέλιμα γίνεται τὰ μυστήρια,

οὕτως εἰς φαντασίαν ἐρχόμεθα, ὅτι ἐπὶ παιδείᾳ καὶ ἐπανορθώσει τοῦ βίου κατεστάθη πάντα ταῦτα ὑπὸ τῶν παλαιῶν.

σὺ δ᾽ ἐξαγγέλλεις αὐτὰ καὶ ἐξορχῇ παρὰ καιρόν, παρὰ τόπον, ἄνευ θυμάτων, ἄνευ ἁγνείας· οὐκ ἐσθῆτα ἔχεις ἣν δεῖ τὸν ἱεροφάντην, οὐ κόμην, οὐ στρόφιον οἷον δεῖ, οὐ φωνήν, οὐχ ἡλικίαν, οὐχ ἥγνευκας ὡς ἐκεῖνος, ἀλλ᾽ αὐτὰς μόνας τὰς φωνὰς ἀνειληφὼς λέγεις· ἱεραί εἰσιν αἱ φωναὶ αὐταὶ καθ᾽ αὑτάς;

ἄλλον τρόπον δεῖ ἐπὶ ταῦτα ἐλθεῖν· μέγα ἐστὶ τὸ πρᾶγμα, μυστικόν ἐστιν, οὐχ ὡς ἔτυχεν οὐδὲ τῷ τυχόντι δεδομένον.

No one sails out of harbor without first sacrificing to the Gods and calling upon them for aid; nor do people sow without invoking Demeter. And will someone who undertakes so great a work undertake it safely without the Gods? Will those who approach such a man approach him to their benefit?

What else are you doing, man, but dancing out the Mysteries? You say: “There is a sanctuary at Eleusis—look, there is one here too. There is a Hierophant there, and I too shall make a Hierophant. There is a Herald there, and I shall appoint a Herald. There is a Torchbearer there, and I too shall appoint a Torchbearer. There are torches there, and here as well. The utterances are the same. How do the things done here differ from those done there?”

Most impious man! Is there no difference? Are these things beneficial when performed outside their proper place and outside their proper time? They must be accompanied by sacrifices and prayers; one must first have purified oneself and prepared one’s mind beforehand, knowing that one is about to approach sacred things—and sacred things of ancient tradition.

In this way the Mysteries become beneficial. In this way we come to understand that all these things were established by the ancients for the formation and setting-right of life.

But you proclaim them openly and dance them out, outside the proper time, outside the proper place, without sacrifices, without purity. You do not have the garments that the Hierophant ought to have, nor the proper hair, nor the headband, nor the voice, nor the age. You have not purified yourself as he has. Instead, you have merely learned the utterances themselves and say: “Are not the utterances sacred in and of themselves?”

One must approach these matters in another way. The matter is great. It is mystic. It is not something to be undertaken casually, nor is it given to just anyone.

People often translate ἐξορχῇ in this passage as “divulging the Mysteries” from the verb ἐξορχεῖσθαι which more literally means dancing out. LSJ gives the specialized sense of “divulge by dancing”, hence to reveal or profane Mysteries.

So Epiktetos says it twice:

τὰ μυστήρια ἐξορχῇ
“you dance out the Mysteries”

And:

σὺ δ᾽ ἐξαγγέλλεις αὐτὰ καὶ ἐξορχῇ
“you proclaim them openly and dance them out.”

A point that’s relevant for contemporary polytheists, especially those who rely on reconstructionism and similar methodologies, is that a tradition needs living words; Epiktetos says αἱ φωναὶ αἱ αὐταί, “the utterances are the same,” but asks what of it? Then at 16 he repeats φωναί emphatically:

αὐτὰς μόνας τὰς φωνὰς ἀνειληφώς
“having learned only the utterances”

ἱεραί εἰσιν αἱ φωναὶ αὐταὶ καθ᾽ αὑτάς;
“Are the utterances sacred in and of themselves?”

Mere verbal replication does not reproduce the rite.

It’s not even possible.

The old rite is missing, broken, dead. 

So we must come up with new rites, new songs, new dances. We need lived religions, rooted in our experiences, engaging with the Gods and spirits of the place where we live. Those can be indigenous or émigré Gods and spirits— they aren’t frozen in amber, aloof and unchanging. They manifest differently in different places— with myriads of faces and myriads of names. And as it says in the New Wine:

Πᾶν θεοῦ ὄνομα θύρα.
Every name of a God is a door.

The Gods and spirits are living beings, and only when a relationship has been forged with them can we hope to be entrusted with Mysteries. Not the ancient Mysteries. Those are gone, lost to the world forever. But real Mysteries, true Mysteries, new Mysteries await manifestation. We just have to make ourselves ready to dance out the Mysteries. 

Which reminds me of one of my favorite epithets of Dionysos— Ἀρχέβακχος.

I am compiling the lore of the Starry Bull tradition into a book called The Labyrinth of Words, and I noticed an interesting parallel between two of the sources. The first is Dionysios of Byzantium, Anaplous of the Bosporos 45:

Σκύθην γάρ φασι μετανάστην ἐκ τῆς αὐτοῦ, προσορμίσασθαι Ταῦρον ὄνομα· τοῦτον δὲ ἐπὶ Κρήτης φασὶ πλεύσαντα διαφθεῖραι Πασιφάην τὴν Μίνωος· ὅθεν ὁ μῦθος τοῦ τε ἔρωτος καὶ τῆς ἐξ αὐτοῦ γενέσεως.

They say that Taurus, a Skythian who had left his homeland, anchored here. From here, they say, he sailed to Crete and seduced Pasiphaë, Minos’s wife. This gave rise to the myth of the love affair and the birth of a child by him.

The Greek actually says Πασιφάην τὴν Μίνωος—“Pasiphaë, Minos’s” without specifying their relationship, so out of respect to her I corrected it to “Minos’s wife.” Taurus is a rational allegorization of Poseidon’s bull. But the truly interesting detail is that he comes from Skythia. 

Now compare that with Nonnos, Dionysiaka 13.238-252:

τοῖος ἀπὸ Κρήτης πρόμος ἤλυθεν· ἐρχομένῳ δὲ
θερμοτέραις ἀκτῖσι χέων μαντήιον αἴγλην
Ἀστερίῳ σελάγιζεν ὁμώνυμος Ἄρεος ἀστήρ,
νίκης ἐσσομένης πρωτάγγελος· ἀλλ᾽ ἐνὶ χάρμῃ
νικήσας νόθον οἶστρον ἀήθεος ἔσχεν ἀρούρης
νηλής· οὐ γὰρ ἔμελλεν ἰδεῖν μετὰ φύλοπιν Ἰνδῶν
πάτριον Ἰδαίης κορυθαιόλον ἄντρον ἐρίπνης,
ἀλλὰ βίον προβέβουλε λιπόπτολιν, ἀντὶ δὲ Δίκτης
Κνώσσιος ἐν Σκυθίῃ μετανάστιος ἔσκε πολίτης,
καὶ πολιὸν Μίνωα καὶ Ἀνδρογένειαν ἐάσας
ξεινοφόνων σοφὸς ἦλθεν ἐς ἔθνεα βάρβαρα Κόλχων,
Ἀστερίους δ᾽ ἐκάλεσσε καὶ ὤπασεν οὔνομα Κόλχοις
Κρητικόν, οἷς ξένα θεσμὰ φύσις πόρε, παιδοκόμου δὲ
πάτριον Ἀμνισοῖο ῥόον Κρηταῖον ἐάσας
αἰδομένοις στομάτεσσι νόθον πίε Φάσιδος ὕδωρ.

Such was the commander who came from Crete. As he advanced, the star of Ares shone upon Asterios, its namesake, pouring out a prophetic light with fiercer rays: the first herald of victory yet to come. But once he had won the battle, a fierce longing seized him for an unfamiliar land. After the war in India he would never again see his homeland or the helmet-bright cave of Mount Ida. He chose instead a life away from home: in place of Dikte, the man of Knossos became a settler in Skythia. Leaving grey-haired Minos and Androgeneia behind, this cultivated man went among the barbarian tribes of the Kolchians, killers of guests. He called them Asterians, giving a Cretan name to people whose nature had given them foreign customs. And leaving the waters of Amnisos, the Cretan stream that had nurtured him, he drank with lips that felt shame the alien waters of the Phasis.

Dionysios’s Taurus is a Skythian migrant who sails to Crete and becomes the father of Pasiphaë’s child. Nonnos’s Asterios, a son of Minos and Androgeneia in this version, leaves Crete and settles among the Kolchians in Skythia. Both passages make migration between Crete and Skythia the setting for a strange reshaping of identity.

And the names make the juxtaposition irresistible: Taurus evokes the bull, while Asterios is the Bull of Minos.

And those last two lines deserve some exploration. Asterios leaves the water that raised him and drinks from a foreign river. Read through the Orphic contrast of Mnemosynē and Lēthē, that becomes a passage about what exile does to memory and identity: he carries a Cretan name into Kolchis, gives that name to others, and then takes its water into himself, sacrificing his old identity. And in case the Orphic undertones aren’t clear enough, the water he’s giving up is the Ἀμνισος, as in ἀνάμνησις, or recollection from ana– (“back”) and mimneskesthai (“to recall”) to “recall back.” He can name the Kolchians after himself, but he cannot make the Phasis into the Amnisos. That drink is the moment when “the past is another country” stops being a metaphor.

Yeah, there’s probably no etymological basis for connecting Amnisos and ἀνάμνησις but it sounds good, damn it, and as Kratylos teaches us that’s what truly matters in the end.

“If I had to hold up the most heavily guarded bank in Europe and I could choose my partners in crime, I’d take a gang of five poets, no question about it. Five real poets, Apollonian or Dionysian, but always real, ready to live and die like poets. No one in the world is as brave as a poet. No one in the world faces disaster with more dignity and understanding. They may seem weak, these readers of Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel, these readers of the deserter Archilochus who picked his way across a field of bones. And they work in the void of the word, like astronauts marooned on dead-end planets, in deserts where there are no readers or publishers, just grammatical constructions or stupid songs sung not by men but by ghosts. In the guild of writers they’re the greatest and least sought-after jewel. When some deluded kid decides at sixteen or seventeen to be a poet, it’s a guaranteed family tragedy. Gay Jew, half black, half Bolshevik: the Siberia of the poet’s exile tends to bring shame on his family too. Readers of Baudelaire don’t have it easy in high school, or with their schoolmates, much less with their teachers. But their fragility is deceptive. So is their humor and the fickleness of their declarations of love. Behind these shadowy fronts are probably the toughest people in the world, and definitely the bravest. Not for nothing are they descended from Orpheus, who set the stroke for the Argonauts and who descended into hell and came up again, less alive than before his feat, but still alive. If I had to hold up the most heavily fortified bank in America, I’d take a gang of poets. The attempt would probably end in disaster, but it would be beautiful.” (Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003)

Μέμνησο· ἐνθάδε πρότερον γέγονας.
“Remember: you have been here before.”

The image from the last post is going to be the cover of one of my upcoming books. 

What makes it work is the split between the girl’s outward composure and what the mirror reveals: externally she is sitting calmly within the rite; internally—or initiatically—she is terrified, trapped, pounding against the threshold while the Minotaur stands behind her. The priest isn’t rescuing her from the image. He’s deliberately holding up the boukranion so that she has to encounter it. The Minotaur isn’t simply “the monster.” He is what the symbol enables her to encounter.

The presence of ΜΕΜΝΗΣΟ on the wall ties it together beautifully: Remember.

I’m thinking the book will be about mystery initiation and the technology of symbols— how myth, ritual environment, symbola, synthemata, altered states, memory, terror, theophany, and interpretation combine to produce transformation.

The title will be taken from the above aphorism:

REMEMBER: YOU HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE
Initiation, Memory, and the Experience of Mystery

The title isn’t merely evocative— it contains the thesis:

The initiate enters the mystery so that death will not be wholly unprecedented. The symbol makes the experience intelligible; the experience makes the symbol real; memory binds the two together. Then, at the final threshold, the instruction is not learn, believe, or even obey.

Remember.

And the cover already tells the story: the calm initiate, the terrified experiential self, the Minotaur, the boukranion, the specialist orchestrating the encounter, and the mirror as the boundary between ordinary perception and mystery.

The mural isn’t background decoration at all. It makes the whole scene recursive.

Dionysos undergoes the primordial pattern: madness → encounter with Kybele → purification/initiation → restoration/transformation, while the Korybantes surround that passage with armed, ecstatic ritual. In front of that image, the girl undergoes her own patterned encounter: preparation → symbolic confrontation → terror → recognition → transformation. And behind her stands the specialist who has already learned how to reproduce the pattern for another person.

So the composition contains three temporal layers simultaneously:

Mythic time: Dionysos underwent this.
Ritual time: you are undergoing this.
Eschatological time: you will undergo this again.

And suddenly:

Μέμνησο· ἐνθάδε πρότερον γέγονας.

becomes even richer. You have been here before doesn’t merely refer to the initiate’s earlier rehearsal. She is entering a pattern that Dionysos himself has already traversed.

That’s very mystery-religion-like conceptually: the God doesn’t merely command the path from outside. The God is the prototype of the path.

Which also gives Βάκχιος αὐτὸς ἔλυσε another dimension. Bakchios can liberate because Bakchios knows liberation from within the mythic pattern. The initiate’s ordeal isn’t merely witnessed by him; it participates in his.

And look at what the image is doing with the boukranion and Minotaur. The priest holds up the dead material symbol; the mirror reveals its living experiential reality. The symbol doesn’t merely represent something. It enables something.

The boukranion is the symbolon.
The Minotaur is the encounter.
The mural is the mythic precedent.
The priest provides the ritual technology.
The girl supplies the embodied experience.
The mirror is the threshold.
And Μέμνησο is what binds all of them across time.

 

Θάρσει. — Take courage.
Μέμνησο. — Remember.
Βάκχιος αὐτὸς ἔλυσε. — Bakchios himself set you free.

Fear. Memory. Liberation.

The discussion of wealth distribution in the last post reminded me of Georges Bataille’s writings, particularly in his three-volume The Accursed Share. 

The Sun is prodigal.

Every moment it pours out an almost inconceivable quantity of energy, without bargaining, without saving, without asking what return it will receive. Only the smallest fraction of that radiance falls upon the Earth, and only a fraction of that is captured by living things. From the standpoint of an accountant, the Sun is catastrophically inefficient. It squanders itself across empty space.

Life responds to this gift with extravagance of its own.

A tree produces more seeds than can possibly become trees. Fish release thousands or millions of eggs so that a handful may survive. Flowers scatter pollen promiscuously upon the wind. Animals produce ornamentation far beyond the minimum necessary for survival: antlers, plumage, songs, dances, colors, scents. Forests grow until they choke one another for sunlight. Vines climb over vines. Life occupies every available niche and, wherever sufficient energy exists, produces not merely enough but too much.

Nature is extraordinarily wasteful.

This observation stands at the beginning of one of the strangest economic theories of the twentieth century: Georges Bataille’s theory of the accursed share.

Bataille believed that most economics begins by asking the wrong question. We ordinarily begin from scarcity. There are limited resources and unlimited wants, so the economic problem is how to acquire, conserve, allocate, and efficiently employ what we possess.

Bataille asked us to look at the problem from the opposite direction.

Before there is scarcity, there is the Sun.

The biosphere receives an immense influx of solar energy. Living organisms use that energy first to survive and then to grow. A plant extends its roots and branches. An animal grows to maturity. A population expands. A society builds houses, roads, farms, temples, workshops, ships, and cities.

But growth cannot continue forever.

Eventually an organism reaches maturity. Eventually a forest fills the available ground. Eventually a society encounters limits to profitable expansion. And yet energy continues arriving.

At that point the fundamental economic problem changes. The question is no longer simply How do we obtain enough?

It becomes:

What do we do with the excess?

That excess is Bataille’s part maudite—the accursed share.

It must be spent.

If a society cannot expend its surplus deliberately, Bataille argues, the surplus will eventually expend itself catastrophically. Wealth can disappear through festivals, monuments, luxury, gifts, sacrifices, games, spectacles, religious foundations, enormous public works, and other forms of conspicuous expenditure. Or it can disappear through warfare and destruction.

But disappear it will.

This is why Bataille was fascinated by societies that modern economic thought often regards as irrational. A king gives away enormous quantities of wealth. A community sacrifices valuable animals to the Gods. An aristocrat bankrupts himself entertaining guests. A civilization devotes generations of labor to constructing a temple whose economic “return” cannot possibly justify its cost. People cover sacred images with gold, burn incense, pour wine onto the Earth, sponsor games, feast strangers, and bury precious objects with the dead.

From the standpoint of accumulation, these things look wasteful.

That is precisely the point.

They transform surplus into meaning.

The Splendor of the Ptolemies

This provides an interesting way of approaching the Ptolemaic ideal of τρυφή (tryphē).

Tryphē can mean softness, luxury, delicacy, sumptuous living, even extravagance. In hostile moralizing sources it can become practically an accusation: decadence, self-indulgence, the softness produced by excessive wealth.

But in the political and religious world of the Ptolemies, royal tryphē could signify something considerably more complicated.

The king’s abundance demonstrated the abundance of his kingdom. His table overflowed because Egypt overflowed. Gold, perfume, wine, exotic animals, elaborate processions, monumental architecture, lavish festivals, and spectacular generosity made prosperity visible. Royal wealth was not supposed to remain invisible in a treasury. It radiated outward.

That is important.

The miser possesses wealth, but nobody flourishes because he possesses it. Wealth hidden away establishes only the owner’s capacity not to spend.

The magnificent ruler does something different. He converts wealth into feasts, temples, patronage, gifts, employment, festivals, monuments, and spectacle. His abundance becomes public.

In that respect tryphē has something solar about it.

The Sun does not demonstrate its power by hoarding light.

It demonstrates its power by shining.

And the wealthy household operates according to a similar logic when it understands prosperity as obligation rather than private consumption.

Wealth Creates Obligations

This brings us back to family.

We tend to imagine wealth individualistically. I earn money; therefore it belongs to me. If I accumulate enough of it, I become successful. The ultimate proof of success is that I possess things other people cannot possess.

But older systems of kinship frequently made wealth much more socially dangerous than that.

To become wealthy was to become somebody from whom things could be expected.

You helped a nephew establish himself. You found employment for a cousin. You supported an elderly relative. You lent money when somebody’s harvest failed. You provided hospitality. You paid for weddings and funerals. You gave gifts. You sponsored religious observances. You entertained guests. You cultivated friendships through generosity. You used your connections to advance people attached to your household.

The greater your fortune became, the larger the network of obligation surrounding you.

This could certainly become corrupt. Patronage becomes nepotism; generosity becomes bribery; dependents become sycophants; gifts become instruments of domination.

But beneath those corruptions lies an important principle:

Surplus creates responsibility.

If your household has ten times what it needs while your brother’s children are starving, something has gone wrong.

Bataille helps us understand why at an even deeper level. Wealth cannot merely accumulate indefinitely. Surplus demands an outlet. The question is not ultimately whether we will expend it, but how.

And different forms of expenditure create different worlds.

The Feast and the Hoard

Imagine two wealthy men.

The first accumulates. Every transaction is evaluated according to whether it increases his holdings. His fortune grows, but its movement increasingly terminates in himself.

The second also accumulates—but partly so that he may distribute. His table is crowded. Relatives find employment through him. Travelers sleep beneath his roof. The Gods receive sacrifices. Festivals are sponsored. Young people are helped into marriages and trades. Friends know that when disaster comes there is somewhere to turn.

Both men are wealthy.

But only one has converted wealth into a world.

That is the deeper meaning of hospitality, patronage, almsgiving, sacrifice, and the feast. They are methods by which private surplus becomes communal abundance.

And this is where Bataille’s seemingly bizarre economics intersects with something traditional societies understood intuitively.

Prestige comes not merely from what you can acquire but from what you can afford to give away.

The great man is the man whose abundance spills over.

Dionysian Economics

There is, naturally, something profoundly Dionysian about all of this.

Wine itself is surplus transformed.

The vine produces grapes; human beings crush them; fermentation transforms their sugars; and the resulting substance exceeds simple nutrition. One does not need wine merely to remain alive. Wine belongs to another category of existence: celebration, intoxication, sacrifice, hospitality, poetry, fellowship.

The symposium is economically irrational if survival is our only measure.

So is the festival.

So is the procession.

So is the sacrifice.

So is covering the image of a God in gold.

So is pouring perfectly drinkable wine onto the ground.

Yet civilizations have repeatedly judged such expenditures indispensable.

Why?

Because human beings do not merely need resources.

We need ways of spending ourselves.

We need occasions on which accumulated wealth, labor, emotion, food, drink, music, sexuality, grief, and joy can overflow the narrow boundaries of individual utility and become something shared.

Dionysos presides precisely over such overflow.

The wine jar is opened. The animal is sacrificed. The procession fills the street. Ordinary work stops. Masks come out. Music begins. Food passes from hand to hand. Social boundaries loosen. The accumulated energies of ordinary existence are released.

The festival consumes resources.

But what it produces cannot adequately be entered into an accountant’s ledger.

It produces memory.

It produces solidarity.

It produces beauty.

It produces contact with the Gods.

It produces the experience of belonging to something larger than oneself.

The Accursed Share

This is why Bataille called the surplus accursed.

Excess is dangerous.

Possessing more than we require does not merely give us freedom. It presents us with a problem. We must decide what deserves the expenditure of that excess.

And perhaps this is where Bataille can correct both the miser and the consumer.

The miser says:

Keep it.

The consumer says:

Spend it on yourself.

The older household ethic says:

Make it fruitful.

Feed people. Honor the Gods. Beautify the world. Strengthen your household. Help establish the next generation. Reward loyalty. Practice hospitality. Create occasions people will remember after you are dead.

Build something unnecessary and magnificent.

Throw a feast.

Give something away.

The point is not reckless consumption. Bataille himself was interested in expenditure far stranger and more dangerous than anything I am recommending here, and there are aspects of his thought I would emphatically not turn into an economic program.

The useful insight is simpler.

Human flourishing cannot be understood entirely through conservation and accumulation.

There must also be expenditure.

The household that only accumulates eventually becomes a tomb for its possessions. The household that cannot conserve anything collapses. Flourishing requires both movements: gathering and dispersal, discipline and generosity, harvest and feast.

Or, to put it in terms the Ptolemies might have understood:

Abundance reaches its perfection when it becomes splendor.

The Sun gives.

The Earth receives.

Life multiplies.

The harvest exceeds hunger.

The wine exceeds thirst.

And the household, when fortune smiles upon it, should become like the Sun: not extinguishing itself through foolishness, but possessing enough strength that some portion of its abundance can radiate beyond itself.

Family strengthens the world.

But abundance, rightly spent, makes that strengthening visible.

The conversation on Hera Teleia took a swerve to an analysis of patriarchal systems. My short answer can be found here.

One thing that almost never gets discussed when people invoke “patriarchy” is that patriarchal societies do not simply divide the world into privileged men and subordinate women. They establish hierarchies among men as well as between men and women, and plenty of men have historically occupied positions of very little power, wealth, or status. A patriarchal order may privilege certain men, but it does not follow that it privileges all men equally— or even that every man occupies a higher social position than every woman. (Ask Latinos about the fear of the chancla.)

Nor does the word patriarchy by itself tell us whether every feature of a particular social order is good or bad. There are patriarchal cultures in which women are subjected to restrictions, coercion, and violence that I have no interest in defending. One can point to contemporary examples in Afghanistan, Pakistan, parts of India and the Middle East without much difficulty. But condemning those abuses does not require pretending that everything associated with patriarchal family organization is therefore abusive, or that the only thing such systems ever gave men was power over women.

What gets left out of the discussion is obligation.

Traditional patriarchal authority was frequently conditional upon an enormous burden of responsibility. The man recognized as head of a household was not simply handed a collection of privileges and told to enjoy himself. He was expected to provide for the family, protect its members, preserve its property and reputation, settle disputes, assist relatives, cultivate alliances, exercise hospitality, and create opportunities for the next generation. Authority and responsibility were supposed to travel together.

That ideal was certainly violated. Human beings violate their ideals in every social system. But the existence of bad patriarchs no more tells us what patriarchal ethics demanded than the existence of corrupt judges tells us what justice demands.

At its best, the patriarch was expected to subordinate a considerable portion of his individual desires to the welfare of people who depended upon him. Men worked themselves into the ground providing for families. They took dangerous jobs. They crossed oceans and borders, sometimes going alone into countries where they knew neither the people nor the language, established themselves, sent money home, brought relatives over, and created opportunities their children and grandchildren would never otherwise have possessed. Sometimes the price of fulfilling that role was their comfort, their health, and even their lives.

That is privilege of a sort. But it is privilege inseparable from duty.

And that distinction matters because the alternative to patriarchal responsibility is not necessarily egalitarian responsibility. Sometimes the alternative is simply irresponsibility.

A society can dismantle traditional authority without successfully transferring the obligations that accompanied it. The result is not automatically liberation. It can instead mean the deadbeat father who disappears and leaves a woman raising children while holding down multiple jobs. It can mean the man who remains physically present while his partner carries the financial, domestic, and parental burdens. It can mean a sexual culture in which intimacy has been severed from obligation, and people are encouraged to regard one another as temporary sources of gratification. It can mean having fewer mechanisms of familial and communal shame capable of compelling an irresponsible man to straighten himself out.

The older model also understood wealth differently. Prosperity was not merely something an individual accumulated for his private consumption. Status brought expectations of generosity. A successful person was expected to perform favors, distribute resources, help relatives, cultivate friendships and alliances, support neighbors, and use his position to advance the fortunes of the larger kinship group. The flourishing of the family across generations mattered more than satisfying every passing desire of the individual.

There are obvious dangers in that model. Family authority can become domination. Discipline can become cruelty. Concern for reputation can conceal abuse. Loyalty can become enforced silence. Women can be denied autonomy in the name of their supposed protection. Children can be crushed beneath expectations they had no role in choosing. None of that should be romanticized.

But neither should the virtues embedded in the model be erased merely because they developed within patriarchal societies: loyalty, sacrifice, provision, protection, discipline, hospitality, intergenerational responsibility, care for dependents, stewardship of inherited resources, and the conviction that acquiring authority increases rather than diminishes one’s obligations to other people.

Perhaps that is the distinction our arguments about patriarchy most desperately need.

Power without responsibility is tyranny. Responsibility without power is exploitation. Authority worthy of respect binds the two together.

If we are going to criticize traditional systems— and there is plenty in them worth criticizing —we should at least understand what they expected of the people to whom they granted authority. Otherwise “patriarchy” stops functioning as a useful description of complicated social arrangements and becomes merely a synonym for “men having things too good.”

History is considerably messier than that.

I like the inscription AI added to this image: Family Strengthens the World.

Σοφὸς γὰρ καὶ σιγῶν τὸν θεὸν τιμᾷ.
“For the wise person honors God even in silence.”
Pythagoras, Sentences 14

Another verse from Ὁ Καινὸς Οἶνος (“The New Wine”) is:

Οὐ τοῦ τέλους κύριος εἶ, ἀλλὰ τῆς παρασκευῆς.
You are not master of the outcome, but of the preparation.

I like this one because it could apply to ritual, teaching, healing, cultivation, art, leadership, and probably most of life.

And τέλους κύριος is doing some heavy lifting. It can mean not only “ruler of the outcome,” but “lord of the completion,” and even “master of the telos.”

That opens the aphorism beyond simple cause-and-effect into vocation and destiny: you may govern your preparation, your discipline, your craft, your readiness— but you are not sovereign over where the whole thing ultimately arrives.

Which makes the contrast with τῆς παρασκευῆς even better. Preparation is concrete, immediate, yours to tend. τέλος is what emerges, culminates, fulfills, or proves to have been the goal. With κύριος between παρασκευή and τέλος the aphorism becomes a statement about the boundary of agency itself.

So it can read as:

• You do not control whether the rite “works”; you control how well you prepared it.
• You do not control whether the student matures; you control the quality of formation you provide.
• You do not control the harvest; you tend the field.
• You do not control whether inspiration arrives; you prepare the vessel.
• You do not control destiny or fulfillment; you govern your readiness.

Οὐ τοῦ τέλους κύριος εἶ is not just a warning about limited human agency. For a Boukolos it is almost a statement of office: you are steward, not sovereign. The rite, the thiasos, the people, the tradition, the fruit of your labor—none of it terminates in you. It has an actual referent:

Εἷς Διόνυσος.
One Dionysos.

And you are there to serve him, to tend his herd. 

The title can get longer, the vestments fancier, the responsibilities broader— but that only increases the obligation to remember whose work it is. Authority does not move you closer to being the κύριος τοῦ τέλους; it makes you more accountable to him. The greater the office, the greater the responsibility. There is one Dionysos, and you are not him.

Something more to keep in mind: the one Dionysos wears many masks. So the Xenos may not merely be “someone we should be welcoming toward.” Xenia becomes a test of recognition. The apparently peripheral person may be the point at which Dionysos has entered his own rite under a mask. If the Boukolos is attentive only to the impressive initiate, the charismatic ecstatic, the wealthy patron, or the people already inside the social circle, he may quite literally miss the God he claims to serve. The Boukolos tends Dionysos’ cattle, but the Bull is not necessarily standing outside the herd wearing a crown and announcing himself. The Bull God may be hiding among his cattle. So the Boukolos should treat the entire herd— Xenos included —as potential Dionysoi. Not because every stranger is an epiphany, and not because discernment disappears— dangerous people remain dangerous people.

And that is why historically Boukoloi were often represented by a staff/crook, a lagobolon, and/or a whip.

It is to protect against the wolves without— and within.

The Boukolos’ hospitality is not passivity.

Xenia is reciprocal and bounded by the safety of the herd. The Xenos is received because they may be under divine protection— or even, in the strongest Dionysian reading, an epiphany of the God himself as Stranger— but the Xenos also incurs obligations by entering into the xenia-relationship. Once they prey upon, endanger, exploit, or deliberately destabilize those entrusted to the Boukolos, the pastoral obligation changes.

And that makes the staff, lagobolon, and whip more than picturesque insignia. They symbolize the whole office: guide the herd, retrieve the wandering, set boundaries, and drive off predators. Crucially, the wolf may already be inside the enclosure. A Boukolos who is welcoming but incapable of exclusion is failing just as certainly as one who treats every Xenos as an enemy.

Which leads to another aphorism from New Wine:

Ὁ καλαῦροψ συνάγει, ἡ μάστιξ ἀμύνει· τὸν βουκόλον εἰδέναι χρὴ πότε ἑκατέρου δεῖ.
“The crook gathers; the whip defends. The Boukolos must know when each is needed.”

It isn’t just intended for Boukoloi. Outside the pastoral imagery it becomes: know when your responsibility is to gather and when it is to defend. Something all of us should discern. 

Hera is so much more than just the Goddess of marriage, though that is perhaps the most profound expression of her powers and nature. The true key to understanding who she is is change, growth and transformation. Hera is a catalyst, an outside force which sets things in motion, which nurtures growth and the transition from one state to another.

Her very name itself is said to be connected etymologically with the Horai or Seasons, in whose company she is frequently depicted. She is the embodiment of this seasonal change: the Argives said that each spring, Hera would bathe in the river Kanathos to regain her virginity, and at Stamphylos she was gifted with the names Pais, Teleia, and Chera, representing the lifecycle of the human female. Yet it is significant that one step is left out— mother.

And that is because she is not a manifestation of the nurturing, fruitful earth out of which all material substance arises and to which it must inevitably return, as scholars and philosophers would have it. No, Hera is the force that acts upon that substance, which causes the lilies to bloom, young girls to grow into women, cows to give birth in the proper season. But none of these happen within her, from her, but rather she is the force that acts upon them from outside, like a potter shaping clay at his wheel, or a maiden plaiting a garland of flowers she intends to offer on Hera’s altar at her marriage.

And in the lives of most women in antiquity, this was the single biggest transition that they would make, for without it, they could not become women. In ancient Greek, the word for bride and woman is the same. So, in that sense, Hera watches over them as they transition into fullness, as they pass from girlhood into womanhood, like Artemis, with whom she shared the epithet Kourotrophos.

Similarly, marriage itself is transition, bringing two separate lives, two separate families and households together into one— thus Hera was also called Zygia, the “Uniter”. This requires constant change as one alters everything about their lives: how they act, how they eat, how they sleep, new responsibilities, when and where they may come and go, who they may associate with, and how they may associate with them. Marriage is never a static thing, and two people can spend a lifetime getting to know each other and becoming comfortable with the person who emerges.

Also, this role applies to the role of heroes, whose name also has been linked with that of Hera. Consider the greatest hero known to the Greek world, Herakles, whose name means either “glory of Hera” or “one made famous through Hera”. And indeed that was the case, because at every step of the road Hera was there, driving him on, throwing obstacles in his path, challenging him, forcing him to become stronger, wiser, and more courageous – or else to become destroyed by the Goddess, like an impure piece of metal bursting under the pressure and fire of the forge.

But Herakles was worthy of the challenge, and at the end of his trials, ascended to Olympos and was met by Hera who gave him her daughter Hebe as his immortal bride. We see this too in her interactions with Dionysos— who is the force of life upon which Hera acts.

And that action, when experienced personally, and especially by those who are resistant to the process, may seem like persecution, madness, suffering— but it is really transformation and growth into fullness, a testing of the will. And those who come out the other end, pure and full, are truly worthy of being called Teleia and Hero.

Question: what is the Starry Bull tradition?

Answer: The entirety of the tradition can be summed up in three aphorisms:

Οὐκ ἔστι τὸ ἄπω.
There is no ‘away.’

Οὐκ εἶ τὸ πάθος σου.
You are not your suffering.

Θήρευε νόημα.
Hunt meaning.

The three together say— you cannot simply escape what happened; you are not reducible to what happened; pursue significance that transcends what happened.

Since I’ve already quoted it a couple times, it seems only appropriate to tease out some of the threads from this gnōme from New Wine:  

οὐ πᾶν τὸ χωλὸν ἀτελές ἐστιν.
“Not everything that limps is incomplete.”

The limp of Dionysos is a mystery, and something scholars have wrestled with for centuries. My favorite “explanation” is that the high-heeled Thracian hunting boots or buskins called kothornoi which Dionysos is both depicted wearing and which became emblematic of the theater since they were part of the panoply of the tragic actor was intended to disguise the God’s limp or mangled foot/leg. As someone who had a severe knee injury that caused me to walk with a limp for a while (and occasionally flares up when I’m having a bad pain jag) let me assure you that high-heeled boots ain’t gonna disguise shit, and would significantly increase my chances of taking a serious fall. The scholars who proposed that should be maimed and forced to hobble around in high heels to see how long it takes them to refine their theories.

Even leaving practical experience aside, kothornoi as concealment-device feels suspiciously like a just-so explanation generated because two Dionysian data points exist—lameness and kothornoi —and therefore somebody felt compelled to make one explain the other.

There is a remarkably rich Dionysian constellation around impaired, abnormal, or unstable locomotion: staggering, dancing, leaping, rushing, wandering, falling, being carried, processional movement, ecstatic movement, and movement between realms or conditions. A God associated with radically altered modes of movement being Χωλός is suggestive even if we cannot say why.

And a limp is particularly interesting because it produces an asymmetrical gait.

Not:

left → right → left → right

But something more like:

step → drag → step → drag

A regular progression disrupted into a different rhythm.

Given how much we’ve been discussing Dionysian zigzags rather than simple linear progression, that symbolism seems especially apt.

There’s also a distinction worth preserving: disability isn’t necessarily symbolic deficiency. Mythic bodies can bear marks that identify divine or heroic figures: scars, blindness, unusual feet, altered limbs, multiple births, dismemberment and reconstruction. The bodily irregularity can itself become part of the sacred morphology.

And Dionysos, of all Gods, hardly requires bodily regularity to establish divine perfection.

ἀτελής isn’t merely “missing something.” It can mean unfinished, incomplete, imperfect, not brought to its τέλος. And τελεῖν / τελετή / τελεστής brings the initiatory vocabulary hovering nearby whether or not the sentence explicitly invokes it.

So the maxim can speak simultaneously about bodies, works, persons, initiatory development, and traditions.

Something can move irregularly and nevertheless be whole.

Something can bear the visible marks of damage without being unfinished.

Something can fail to conform to the expected pattern and nevertheless have reached its τέλος.

And wonderfully, it doesn’t say:

τὸ χωλὸν τέλειόν ἐστιν
“The limping thing is perfect.”

That would merely replace one facile judgment with another.

It says οὐ πᾶν.

Not everything.

Discern.

That little qualification makes its presence beside the other New Wine sayings even more certain. It isn’t reassurance. It’s a tool for thought.

And part of the mystery is the symmetry that Dionysos’ lameness creates, if one accepts the Sicilian interpretation of Dionysos as the “limp of Zeus.” That makes ἀτελές hit even harder because the apparent defect becomes part of a larger completeness. Brought into conjunction with Dionysos abnormal birth from Zeus’ thigh which had caused the King of Gods and men to temporarily limp then Dionysos’ lameness isn’t merely an isolated peculiarity of his body. It creates a correspondence between father and son:

• Zeus bears Dionysos in the thigh.
• Dionysos bears the mark in his gait.

The irregularity becomes almost a birth-sign.

And there’s a beautiful reversal in it too. Ordinarily we expect the parent to transmit bodily characteristics to the child through generation. Here Dionysos’ extraordinary generation effectively marks both bodies: Zeus’ thigh becomes the site of gestation/birth, while Dionysos emerges into mythology with this mysterious constellation of lameness, unusual footwear, and abnormal gait.

So neither is quite intelligible without the other.

Which makes: 

οὐ πᾶν τὸ χωλὸν ἀτελές ἐστιν.
“Not everything that limps is incomplete.”

Almost mischievously precise.

Because Dionysos’ limp may signify precisely the opposite of ἀτελής: something has been completed.

The second birth happened.

The child came forth.

The strange pregnancy of Zeus reached its τέλος.

And the God walks differently afterward.

There’s even a broader pattern here that I wouldn’t turn into historical explanation but would absolutely think with: Dionysos repeatedly emerges from transformations that ought to produce an “incomplete” being.

• Prematurely born.
• Transferred from one bearer to another.
• Sewn into Zeus.
• Born again.
• Dismemberment.
• Reconstitution.
• Masked.
• Sexually and socially ambiguous.
• The limp.

Yet the result is not ἀτελής.

Indeed, Dionysos is Τέλειος.

And a conjunction is created.

Χωλός ◈ — Limping
Τέλειος ◈ — Perfected; Completed; Fulfilled; Initiated

Those two epithets now belong in conversation.

The mystery isn’t that Dionysos somehow overcomes an imperfection and becomes complete despite it.

It’s more radical:

What if we were wrong about which features indicate completeness in the first place?

Then the maxim doesn’t merely say “don’t judge the disabled.”

It asks:

What does τέλειος actually look like?

Apparently, sometimes it limps.

As I’ve mentioned I am currently working on Ὁ Καινὸς Οἶνος (“The New Wine“) a collection of modern Dionysian aphorisms to go with Ὁ Παλαιὸς Οἶνος (“The Old Wine”) a collection of ancient Dionysian aphorisms.

I have been thinking about one of the aphorisms included in New Wine since watching David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method about the productive but tumultuous relationship between Freud and Jung. Today I’d like to share some thoughts on the aphorism: 

μόνος ὁ τετρωμένος θεραπευτὴς ἐλπίζειν δύναται τοὺς τετρωμένους θεραπεύειν.
“Only the wounded healer can hope to heal the wounded.”

θεραπεύειν feels especially right here rather than merely ἰᾶσθαι, because therapeuein contains a broader constellation of cultivating: to tend, attend, serve, care for, and only from there to heal. The wounded healer doesn’t necessarily cure the wounded— he knows how to tend them.

That distinction between healing and curing is supremely important. 

θεραπεύειν doesn’t promise restoration to some imagined pristine condition. It begins with attendance: being present, tending, serving, caring for. Sometimes that results in recovery. Sometimes the wound remains and what changes is the person’s relationship to it.

Which makes the qualification ἐλπίζειν δύναται — “can hope” essential too. 

Woundedness confers neither wisdom nor competence automatically. A wound can teach you— or consume you. The wounded healer is valuable because they may recognize terrain that someone untouched by it cannot, but they still have to learn the craft of θεραπεία.

So the maxim avoids two romanticizations simultaneously— suffering does not automatically make you wise, and healing does not necessarily mean making someone unwounded.

That feels particularly appropriate beside another of our gnōmai:

Οὐ πᾶν τὸ χωλὸν ἀτελές ἐστιν.
“Not everything that limps is incomplete.”

The goal isn’t necessarily to make the limping thing stop limping. Sometimes you learn how to tend what limps without mistaking it for incomplete.

With the wording of our aphorism you know I couldn’t escape talking about Jung, even if I hadn’t just watched A Dangerous Method.

“Only the wounded healer can hope to heal the wounded” is almost a compressed statement of the Jungian wounded-healer archetype, but the words “can hope to” protect it from one of the easiest misreadings of Jung.

Jung’s major discussion is in Fundamental Questions of Psychotherapy (1951), where he uses the figure of the wounded physician to describe what occurs in the therapeutic relationship. His point isn’t simply that therapists ought to have suffered. It’s that the analyst’s own psychic vulnerability participates in the encounter. The analyst cannot remain an untouched technician manipulating somebody else’s psyche from outside.

For Jung, genuine psychological encounter changes both people.

The wound is the point of contact

The physician’s wound matters because it creates the possibility of recognition.

Someone who has encountered their own darkness— their shadow, irrationality, fear, shame, destructiveness, dependency, grief, contradiction— cannot quite look at another wounded person as merely a defective specimen.

They know something about the territory.

But here’s the crucial Jungian qualification: having a wound does not make you a healer.

An unconscious wound can make you extraordinarily dangerous to wounded people.

If I have never confronted my own need for approval, for instance, I may unconsciously cultivate dependency in the person I’m supposedly helping. If I haven’t faced my own rage, I may condemn theirs. If I cannot bear helplessness, I may compulsively “rescue” people because their helplessness activates something intolerable in me.

That’s shadow projection and countertransference territory.

So there are really three figures:

• the unwounded healer — imagines himself above the condition he treats;
• the unconsciously wounded healer — treats his own wounds through other people without realizing it;
• the consciously wounded healer — knows that the wound is present and therefore can distinguish, imperfectly but increasingly, your wound from mine.

Only the third possesses what Jung was interested in.

For Jungians the archetypal figure is, of course, Cheiron. His mythology contains the paradox beautifully. Cheiron possesses extraordinary healing knowledge, yet suffers from a wound he cannot heal. That’s not an embarrassing contradiction in the archetype. That is the archetype.

The healer isn’t someone who has mastered suffering so completely that suffering no longer touches him. His authority comes partly from continuing to inhabit the human condition that his knowledge addresses.

A therapeutēs cannot merely stand outside the suffering and eliminate it. He tends to it.

Jungian individuation isn’t a process by which all one’s damaged, shameful, frightening, contradictory pieces get removed until only the Healthy Personality™ remains.

Quite the reverse.

It involves becoming capable of acknowledging and integrating psychic realities the ego would rather disown.

The wound can therefore become incorporated into a larger personality without ceasing to be a wound.

That gives us an important distinction. 

“I am wounded.”

Is different from:

“I am nothing but my wound.”

And both differ from:

“I am no longer wounded.”

Again, that sits beautifully beside:

Οὐ πᾶν τὸ χωλὸν ἀτελές ἐστιν.
“Not everything that limps is incomplete.”

Wholeness and perfection are not synonyms.

In Jungian language, wholeness includes the wound.

And that’s why “can hope to” is so good

If I’d phrased it:

“Only the wounded healer can heal the wounded.”

It could turn suffering into spiritual credentialism: 

“I’ve suffered, therefore I understand you; therefore I am qualified to heal you.”

That’s precisely where wounded-healer rhetoric becomes dangerous.

But:

“Only the wounded healer can hope to heal the wounded.”

Doesn’t grant the healer mastery.

The wound creates possibility, not entitlement.

The healer still needs knowledge, discipline, ethical boundaries, self-examination, and humility. And in Jungian terms, they must remain attentive to what the patient awakens in their own unconscious.

There’s also a beautiful reversal here. The wounded person doesn’t merely receive the healer’s gift. The patient activates the healer’s wound. Consequently, the therapeutic relationship can expose material in the healer that still requires integration.

The person who comes seeking θεραπεία can therefore become, unknowingly, part of the healer’s θεραπεία.

Not because the healer should use them therapeutically— that would be an ethical disaster —but because real encounter leaves neither participant entirely unchanged.

This is where our version moves beyond Jung.

Jung tends toward integration into psychic wholeness. Our emerging Dionysian vocabulary introduces another possibility: sometimes transformation requires not merely integrating material into the existing self, but going beyond that self.

Which returns us unexpectedly to the Sequence of Four:

• Φίλος τῶν ἐξισταμένων — Friend of Those Who Step Beyond Themselves
• Φίλος τῶν ἑαυτῶν κρατούντων — Friend of Those Who Master Themselves
• Φίλος τῶν θεραπευόντων — Friend of Those Who Care For What Is Entrusted to Them
• Φίλος τῶν ὑπομενόντων — Friend of Those Who Endure

The wounded healer needs all four.

• Ekstasis prevents the wound from becoming the boundary of identity.
• Self-mastery prevents the healer’s wound from taking control of the encounter.
• Therapeia turns attention outward toward what has been entrusted to one’s care.
• Endurance accepts that neither healing nor individuation happens according to the ego’s preferred timetable.

And that produces what may be the deepest Jungian reading of our maxim: the healer’s wound is not valuable merely because it hurt. It becomes valuable when it has been consciously suffered, tended, integrated, and transformed into a capacity to remain present before another person’s wound without fleeing from it, exploiting it, or demanding that it resemble one’s own.

And sometimes the most important thing they can offer is not:

“I know how to make this go away.”

But:

“I know how to remain here while it hurts.”

Nietzsche would probably regard the Jungian wounded-healer model with a mixture of recognition and suspicion. He knew intimately that suffering can transform a person, but he’d be deeply wary of turning the wound itself into a credential or making healing the supreme value.

The Nietzschean counterpoint might begin:

“The question is not whether you have been wounded, but what you have made from your wound.”

That changes almost everything.

Nietzsche would distrust the prestige of woundedness; Nietzsche repeatedly distinguishes between suffering that produces greater strength and suffering that produces ressentiment. Pain possesses no automatic moral or spiritual authority. A person can suffer enormously and become narrower, more vindictive, more frightened, more obsessed with assigning blame. Indeed, suffering can become the foundation of an identity whose continued existence requires the wound never to heal.

That’s where Nietzsche would attack a sentimental interpretation of the wounded healer.

“I have suffered, therefore I understand suffering.”

No.

“I have suffered, therefore I am compassionate.”

Also no.

“I have suffered, therefore I am qualified to guide others.”

Absolutely not.

The wound tells us that something happened to you. What you subsequently did with it tells us something about you.

Jung seeks integration; Nietzsche demands transformation

There’s a significant difference of emphasis here.

The Jungian question tends toward:

“How can this wound be incorporated into a greater psychic wholeness?”

Nietzsche’s question is closer to:

“What can you create from it?”

This is the territory of amor fati. Not merely enduring what happened, and certainly not pretending that terrible things were secretly good, but reaching the terrifying affirmation:

“This belongs to my life too.”

The ideal isn’t restoration to the person one was before the wound.

That person is gone.

Nor is it necessarily “healing” if healing means returning to normative functioning.

The wound becomes material.

And here Nietzsche suddenly sounds very compatible with our agricultural vocabulary.

Cultivate until it bears fruit.

The soil doesn’t justify the manure by calling it beautiful. It uses it.

This is perhaps the sharpest counterpoint.

Why assume that the wounded require healing?

Nietzsche might suspect that beneath the language of healing lurks a normative judgment:

“There is a correct condition for human beings, and suffering represents deviation from it.”

But some wounds destroy illusions that needed destroying.

Some suffering strips away inherited values.

Some breakdowns expose structures of life that were already intolerable.

Sometimes what appears to be sickness from the perspective of the herd is the painful beginning of becoming something else.

That’s why Nietzsche’s physician-philosopher imagery is so interesting. Diagnosis matters— but the “health” he seeks isn’t bland normality. Great health is something dynamic: the capacity to undergo sickness, transformation, experimentation and danger and repeatedly regain oneself— or discover another self worth becoming.

So where Jung says: integrate the wound,

Nietzsche might answer: overcome through it.

Not necessarily overcome it.

Through it.

Dionysos makes the disagreement especially interesting.

Because Nietzsche’s Dionysos isn’t principally the compassionate healer.

He is the divine affirmation of becoming.

Creation and destruction aren’t cleanly separable. Life consumes life. Forms arise, flourish, perish, and become material for new forms. The Dionysian affirmation says yes not merely to pleasure but to the whole terrible process.

That gives our maxim a harsher Nietzschean counterpart:

“The wounded healer must first prove that the wound has not become his master.”

Otherwise he may simply reproduce it.

The abused becomes an abuser.

The humiliated seeks someone beneath him to take out their frustrations on.

The excluded builds an identity around exclusion.

The betrayed becomes incapable of trust.

And then suffering masquerades as wisdom.

Nietzsche would probably be merciless about that.

But someone who has metabolized suffering— who has turned pain into insight, discipline, humor, creation, courage, greater capacity for life— possesses something altogether different.

Not authority because I suffered. Authority because you can see what I made from my suffering.

This also complicates θεραπεία. As I said earlier, the wounded healer doesn’t necessarily cure. He tends.

Nietzsche might respond:

“Good. But be careful what you tend.”

Some things should be preserved.

Some should be strengthened.

Some should be pruned.

Some should be allowed to die.

And sometimes θεραπεία becomes pathological when care means endlessly preserving a form of life that needs to be overcome.

Suddenly another New Wine maxim enters the conversation:

Τέμνε ἵνα θάλλῃ.
“Prune that life may flourish.”

That’s an extraordinarily Nietzschean complement to the wounded-healer maxim.

Compassion without discernment can preserve weakness. Pruning without compassion can become brutality. The difficult art is knowing which moment requires which excellence.

Where I think Jung and Nietzsche can actually meet— Jung supplies an indispensable warning: do not imagine yourself above the wound. Know your own darkness, because otherwise you will unconsciously inflict it upon those entrusted to you.

Nietzsche supplies an equally indispensable warning: do not worship the wound. Suffering gives you no rank. Show me what has grown from it.

Put those together and the original maxim becomes considerably stronger:

Μόνος ὁ τετρωμένος θεραπευτὴς ἐλπίζειν δύναται τοὺς τετρωμένους θεραπεύειν.
“Only the wounded healer can hope to heal the wounded.”

Jung emphasizes τετρωμένος: the healer must know woundedness from within.

Nietzsche interrogates θεραπευτής: What makes you think your wound has made you capable of tending anyone?

And the answer has to be demonstrated through character, practice and fruit.

Which brings us straight back to:

γεώργει ἕως καρπὸν φέρῃ.
“Cultivate until it bears fruit.”

Don’t show me the wound. Show me what grew there.

Greek tragedy changes the maxim substantially. Jung asks how the wound can become a site of consciousness; Nietzsche asks what one can make from the wound.

Tragedy asks a more frightening question: what if the wound gives you knowledge— and the knowledge still cannot save you?

That is profoundly tragic. 

Again and again, tragedy gives special knowledge to people who have suffered. Oedipus becomes capable of seeing only after destroying his eyes. Philoctetes possesses the indispensable weapon precisely while living with an incurable, disgusting wound. Cassandra knows what everyone else cannot see, but her knowledge is inseparable from the curse that prevents others from accepting it.

Even Dionysos in Bakchai arrives carrying a history of injury: his mother’s destruction, the denial of his maternity and divinity, the persecution of his rites. And Pentheus’ refusal to recognize what stands before him eventually makes him the wound torn open at the center of the city.

Tragic knowledge is frequently expensive knowledge.

You don’t merely learn it. You are marked by having learned it.

Tragedy rejects the therapeutic fantasy.

This is where tragedy offers a powerful corrective to our word θεραπευτής.

Greek tragedy rarely gives us the comforting structure:

wound → wisdom → healing → restoration

Sometimes there is restoration. Often there isn’t.

Oedipus discovers the truth.

And?

Jocasta is still dead.
Laius is still dead.
Incest has still occurred.
The children still carry the consequences.

The truth doesn’t rewind the tragedy.

Likewise, no amount of insight can restore Agamemnon after Clytemnestra kills him. Orestes’ vengeance doesn’t restore Agamemnon either; it produces another corpse and another pollution. Apollon’s command solves one obligation by creating another catastrophe.

Tragedy understands something very uncomfortable: sometimes there is no unwounded state to which we can return.

That makes the choice of θεραπεύειν rather than simply “cure” even more appropriate. When restoration is impossible, care remains possible.

Even more than Cheiron, Philoctetes may be the purest expression of the wounded healer. Philoctetes is fascinating here because his wound is simultaneously: his suffering, his exclusion, his humiliation, and part of what makes him indispensable.

The Greeks abandon him because his wound is intolerable.

Then they discover they need him.

That is very close to:

Οὐ πᾶν τὸ χωλὸν ἀτελές ἐστιν.
“Not everything that limps is incomplete.”

From the utilitarian perspective of the army, Philoctetes initially appears defective. He cannot function properly within the expedition. He smells. He cries out. His wound disrupts ritual.

Solution: Get rid of him.

Except the supposedly defective man possesses something without which Troy cannot fall.

The community discovers that what it expelled as unacceptable suffering must be brought back into the collective.

A wound does not necessarily produce compassion. It can propagate itself.

Clytemnestra is wounded.
Medea is wounded.
Hecuba is wounded almost beyond comprehension.

Each acquires terrible insight through suffering. And each can become the agent through which suffering perpetuates itself. 

That’s crucial.

In tragedy the wounded can heal the wounded. But the wounded can also wound the wounded. Frequently they do both.

That makes “can hope to” indispensable.

The wound establishes kinship with suffering. It does not determine what you will do with that kinship.

Tragedy frequently understands suffering as something larger than an individual’s psychology.

A murder creates another murder.

A violated obligation demands response.

A curse moves through generations.

Children inherit consequences produced before their birth.

The house itself becomes sick.

The οἶκος remembers.

So the tragic healer cannot merely ask:

“What is wrong with this individual?”

They must ask:

“What story is this wound part of?”

That is an enormous difference from much modern therapeutic language.

Orestes isn’t simply a traumatized young man with an unhealthy family dynamic. He’s standing inside an inherited network of kinship, murder, divine obligation, vengeance, pollution and competing claims of justice. You cannot heal Orestes without somehow addressing the House of Atreus. The wound has a genealogy.

Something most religious specialists would take a look at and say, “Sorry, but that’s way above my pay grade.”

Greek tragedy’s great mechanism is ἀναγνώρισις— recognition.

And recognition often hurts.

The decisive moment isn’t: “Now I feel better.”

It is: “Now I know what this is.”

Or worse: “Now I know who I am.”

Oedipus spends the play healing Thebes by seeking the source of its pollution.

And eventually discovers: the healer is the wound.

That’s almost unbearably relevant to our maxim.

The wounded healer cannot stand outside the wounded community and say, “I have come to fix you.”

He may be implicated in precisely what he is attempting to heal.

The investigator becomes the object of investigation.

The purifier discovers his own pollution.

The person asking where is the wound? eventually has to say: here.

And yet tragedy isn’t nihilistic.

This matters.

Tragedy doesn’t generally say that because suffering cannot be undone, nothing can be done.

The Oresteia doesn’t resurrect anybody.

Instead, something new is constructed from an irresolvable inheritance.

The Erinyes aren’t simply destroyed.

Athena doesn’t announce that their anger was pathological and must be cured.

Instead reconciliation is negotiated and they are given a new relationship to the community.

The destructive power becomes capable of another function without ceasing to possess its terrifying nature.

And when applied to the wound we’ve been discussing, the goal isn’t necessarily: remove it.

Sometimes the work is: give it another place in the order of things.

And then there is the unavoidable fact that tragedy itself belongs to Dionysos.

The audience watches people suffer.

Not because their suffering is amusing.

Not because the play gives them five practical steps for avoiding similar outcomes.

The suffering is made into form. Language, meter, masks, music, dance, plot and ritual contain something otherwise unbearable.

That suggests another meaning of the wounded healer:

The tragedian is a wounded healer.

He does not cure suffering.

He gives suffering a form in which it can be encountered.

And the audience participates.

We sit together before terror, grief, injustice, madness, death and irreconcilable obligation— and rather than fleeing, we look.

For a while, suffering becomes something that can be sung.

That’s θεραπεία of a very Dionysian sort.

Not: “This no longer hurts.”

But: “This can be borne long enough to be witnessed.”

And perhaps even: “This can become beautiful without ceasing to be terrible.”

Which suddenly makes another of our maxims relevant:

Πέρας ἑκουσίως δεχθὲν μορφὴ γίνεται.
“A limitation willingly accepted becomes a form.”

Tragedy imposes form upon suffering without pretending that form explains suffering away.

So the tragic reading of the maxim is that only the wounded healer can hope to heal the wounded because only someone marked by suffering may recognize what suffering actually demands. But the wound grants neither wisdom nor goodness. Unexamined, it reproduces itself as vengeance, pollution and inherited catastrophe. Recognized and given form, it may become knowledge, compassion, justice, art, ritual, or a new order.

And even then, healing does not mean that what happened is undone.

While the future may (or may not) have some flexibility, the past is fixed.  

That’s much darker than the Jungian version. And less triumphalist than the Nietzschean one.

Jung asks: “Can the wound be integrated?”

Nietzsche asks: “Can the wound be transmuted into strength and creation?”

Tragedy asks: “Can we discover what the wound requires of us before we pass it on?”

And Dionysos sits in the theater watching all three answers, and nodding. Because at different times, in different ways, each contains a truth. 

But also because tragedy knows something profoundly Bacchic: sometimes what saves us is not escaping the terrible thing. It is finding the song, mask, rite, community, or form through which we can finally witness it without looking away.

Language changes what is readily thinkable.

Once you’ve distinguished:

breaking ≠ opening ≠ stretching ≠ loosening ≠ expanding

You can suddenly notice differences in myths, rituals, experiences and epithets that previously got filed under the vague heading “Dionysian boundary dissolution.”

That’s what good technical vocabulary does. It doesn’t merely give fancy names to things we already understood perfectly. Sometimes the new distinction permits the thought.

Which returns us yet again to:

Πᾶν θεοῦ ὄνομα θύρα.
Every name of a God is a door.

A Lexicon of Divine Names is therefore potentially a technology of attention. Learn another name and you acquire another way of noticing him.

A rich vocabulary doesn’t merely enable you to say more things about Dionysos. It trains you to notice more things about Dionysos.

If you know him only as “God of Wine,” wine is what you notice. Add Liberator, and you begin noticing liberation. Add Mind-Charmer, and certain transformations of consciousness become legible. Add Shepherd of Plants, and tending becomes visible where previously you saw only vegetation. Add Who Carries Across, and apparently unrelated myths about rivers, death, initiation and thresholds begin forming a constellation.

The names don’t manufacture those relationships. They teach attention where to look.

And that may be one reason Πᾶν θεοῦ ὄνομα θύρα has such force:

Every name of a God is a door.

The name doesn’t tell you everything behind the door.

It gets the door open.

At the end of my Λεξικὸν τῶν Ἐπιθέτων καὶ Ἐπικλήσεων τοῦ Διονύσου (“Lexicon of the Epithets and Cult-Titles of Dionysos”) there is a brief list of dialectical variants of the name Dionysos:

• Δεονῦδος = Abdera
• Δεονῦος = Thasos
• Δεονῦς = Erythrae
• Δεόνυσος = Samos
• Δεύνυσος = Miletos
• Διένυσος = Amorgos
• Δίνυσος = Olbia
• Δίννυς = Chios
• Δίννυσος = Cumae
• Διοννυσίαν = Eleutherna
• Διόννυσος = Tyrnavos
• Διόνουσος = Boeotia
• Διονῦδος = Colophon
• Διόνυξος = Byzantine lexicographical tradition
• Διονῦς = Alexandria
• Διόνυσος = Athens
• Διονυτᾶς = Teos
• Διωνίουσος = Boeotia
• Διώνουσος = Boeotia
• Διώνυσος = Homeric
• Διϝόνυσος = Argos
• Ζόννυσος = Mytilene
• 𐌐𐌖𐌘𐌋𐌖𐌍𐌔 = Puplonia
• 𐀇𐀺𐀝𐀰 = Pylos
• ⲇⲓⲟⲛⲏⲥⲟⲥ = Hermopolis
• Dionysus = Rome
• Tinunuś = Magliano

Watching Dionysos travel from Linear B 𐀇𐀺𐀝𐀰 through digamma and its loss, a bunch of different regional dialects of Greek, then Etruscan, Latin and Coptic, ending up preserved in Byzantine lexicography feels less like linguistic history and more like the God refusing to leave the stage.

But one of these is not like the others.

There’s something beautiful and sad about that odd variant Διόνυξος. The other entries are all rooted in places, but Διόνυξος only survives in antiquarian books written by at least nominal Christians. (With sporadic outbursts of Bacchomania, but that’s chronicled elsewhere.)

Among the various projects I’m working on currently is a substantial revision of my collection of epitheta and epiklēseis of Dionysos. Distinguishing between anciently attested material and Starry Bull coinages, correcting the grammatical and morphological errors of the latter, filling in gaps and pruning redundancies and irrelevancies that do not reflect how the God has revealed himself to us within the tradition, and other things that will make it a tighter, more informative,  and all-around better resource. It’s not yet ready to share, but there are a couple things I’d like to discuss with y’all, starting with a portion of it I call the Sequence of Four. 

The Sequence consists of:

• Φίλος τῶν ἐξισταμένων ✦ Friend of Those Who Step Beyond Themselves
• Φίλος τῶν ἑαυτῶν κρατούντων ✦ Friend of Those Who Master Themselves
• Φίλος τῶν θεραπευόντων ✦ Friend of Those Who Care For What Is Entrusted to Them
• Φίλος τῶν ὑπομενόντων ✦ Friend of Those Who Endure

I didn’t intend to create a character formation program— they were just titles that came to me independently as I worked on the Lexicon over the last week— but if you look closely you’ll discover that that is precisely what the Sequence does.

Go beyond yourself,

to master yourself.

Care for what has been entrusted to you,

and remain when caring becomes difficult.

The first pair governs the self: 

Transcendence and Mastery

The second pair governs the relationship between self and world: 

Stewardship and Perseverance

And all four are framed not as commandments, but as friendship with Dionysos.

That’s important. 

They don’t say:

Dionysos commands that you… 

They say:

Φίλος… Friend.

Practice these things and you are practicing qualities dear to the God. That returns the entire ethical vocabulary to one of the aphorisms found in New Wine: 

Τί φίλον Διονύσῳ 

What is dear to Dionysos?

Each of the Four is one of the Ἀρεταί (Virtues or Excellences) that form the foundation of our ethical teaching, united with Love, ensuring that they don’t become an impersonal checklist of pretty-sounding ideals that have no genuine impact on the practitioner’s life. What love touches is never the same again.

And there’s another beautiful structural feature that I fear could be easily overlooked. The participles make these activities, not identities:

• ἐξισταμένων — people stepping beyond
• κρατούντων — people mastering
• θεραπευόντων — people caring/tending
• ὑπομενόντων — people enduring

It doesn’t divide humanity into “the Ecstatic,” “the Self-Mastered,” “the Steward,” and “the Persevering,” as though these were permanent personality types.

They’re things people do. That fits the whole cultivation metaphor beautifully: an Excellence isn’t something you possess like an achievement badge. It’s something you practice, that you cultivate— slowly, carefully, over the span of months, years, and decades.

Sometimes successfully. 

Sometimes poorly. 

Sometimes after getting it right, they backslide.

Sometimes after failing over and over again, they stand when it truly matters most. 

The Sequence of Four don’t just tell you what to do, they also explain— even more valuably —how to do it: 

The way to master yourself is to go beyond yourself; 

to properly care for what is yours you must endure. 

The paradox is that self-mastery requires stepping outside the self you’re trying to master. If you’re wholly identified with an appetite, fear, anger, delusion, a role you perform, or a transitory self-conception you formed in an ephemeral moment, you cannot govern your self (ἐγώ) because there’s no experiential distance between “I” and “this thing happening within me.” Ecstasy— in the broad sense encoded by the Excellence as “the willingness to step beyond the narrow self” —creates that distance. 

I am angry becomes I am experiencing anger.

I am afraid becomes fear is moving through me.

I need this becomes a powerful desire is present.

That tiny displacement can create the room in which ἐγκράτεια becomes possible. Going beyond the narrow self doesn’t necessarily mean losing control. Properly understood, it can be one of the ways we acquire greater freedom of action.

So:

Step beyond yourself → Master yourself → Stewardship.

Stewardship sounds lovely until the thing entrusted to you becomes difficult.

A garden is easy to love in bloom. 

A tradition is easy to serve when everything is exciting and expanding. 

A community is easy to care for when everybody gets along. 

A relationship is easy to cherish when nobody is suffering. 

A vocation is easy to embrace when you’re succeeding.

Winter tests stewardship.

If care disappears when its object becomes burdensome, disappointing, damaged, inconvenient, or temporarily fruitless, it wasn’t yet the full Excellence one is encouraged to cultivate within the Starry Bull tradition.

Therefore:

Care for what is entrusted to you → endure.

But I’d also encourage one to read the arrows backward:

• Master yourself → become capable of stepping beyond yourself safely.
• Endure → become capable of caring across time.

So these aren’t really linear instructions.

They’re reciprocal and cyclical:

• Ecstasy ↔ Self-Mastery
• Stewardship ↔ Perseverance

Each Excellence corrects and enables its partner.

Ecstasy without self-mastery risks dissolution.

Self-mastery without ecstasy risks imprisonment in the illusions of self.

Stewardship without perseverance lasts only through Summer.

Perseverance without something worth tending becomes mere stubbornness.

That last distinction is particularly important: ὑπομονή isn’t valuable merely because someone refuses to quit. Endurance receives its orientation from what one has undertaken to care for.  Sometimes proper stewardship actually requires pruning, relinquishing, changing course, or admitting that something has died.

Subjects that are addressed by several of the aphorisms in New Wine:

Θεράπευε τὸν ἀμπελῶνα.

Tend the vineyard.

 

Καιρὸς καὶ τοῦ τέμνειν.

There is a season for pruning.

 

Οὐ πᾶν τὸ ἄγριον τέμνε.

Do not prune everything wild.

 

Τέμνε ἵνα θάλλῃ.

Prune that life may flourish.

The sayings behave like the epithets: one prevents another from becoming foolish and dangerous  when applied arbitrarily or ad summum. 

And that, I think, is one of the most important things about the ethical system of the Starry Bull— they are relational and corrective. The Excellences work best not as eighteen isolated virtues but as a web of ethical vocabulary. Their meaning emerges through conjunction, tension, mutual correction, and circumstance.

Which is an extremely appropriate ethical system for a tradition whose God is the movement through the opposition.

And now I’d like to say a couple things about the art that accompanies this post. I have started using AI to create art for this blog because I know it’s probably not going to rape children like a human artist I worked with in the past, and I can give it incredibly precise (and also vague and rambling) instructions and get the kind of thing you see above. Here’s an excerpt of the instructions I gave T-800, my pet name for the art-generator I collaborate with:

For the Sequence itself, I’d make the relationships visible rather than illustrating four virtues as four separate allegorical figures.

I think the strongest way to express that is through one person undergoing four simultaneous actions around a central axis:

• • Step Beyond Yourself — the figure’s translucent double is stepping outward from their body, perhaps crossing the boundary of a Labyrinth.
  • Master Yourself — the physical figure remains poised at the center, holding a cup of wine perfectly level despite violent movement around them.
  • Care for What Is Entrusted to You — hands tending a vine climbing a trellis.
  • Endure — the figure/vine passes through winter: bare branches, snow or darkness behind them, while a single new shoot or bud demonstrates that endurance is directed toward renewed life.

Actually, don’t divide the picture into four panels. That would turn them back into four independent virtues.

Instead, make it circular.

Dionysos stands in the center of the Labyrinth. Around him are four human figures— but they’re clearly the same person at different moments.

One is dancing ecstatically beyond the Labyrinth wall.

One stands composed before Dionysos holding the wine cup.

One kneels tending the vine growing around the God’s feet.

One sits vigil beside that vine in winter.

Then—and this is the crucial detail— the path doesn’t terminate.

It returns.

When we see the vine again, it has flowered.

That would let the image say something the four Greek titles alone don’t immediately disclose: you don’t complete these Excellences. You circulate through them.

And Dionysos isn’t doing any of those things for them. He’s simply present at the center of all four. 

And perhaps the four manifestations of the practitioner could subtly correspond to the four colors/seasons:

• • White — stepping beyond
  •  Gold — mastery
  •  Red — tending
  •  Black — endurance

Or some other arrangement if it doesn’t look good. I wouldn’t force them merely to get the colors into the image.

And the results speak for themselves. 

Of course there’s a lot I couldn’t share with T-800 that I’d like to share with you, as I think it will enhance the above conversation, beginning with some notes I jotted down after smoking a lot of weed, putting on a Tool album, and staring at the picture for close to an hour. 

The ecstatic double steps outward, curves around, and eventually returns toward the mastered self. The vine grows outward from the person’s care, passes through a region of winter, survives, and curves back bearing fruit.

So visually there are two circuits:

Self

Ecstasy → Self-Mastery → Ecstasy

World

Stewardship → Perseverance → Stewardship

And those circuits intertwine like a double spiral around the central figure. Each pair makes the other possible.

Since I was making art rather than a diagram, I didn’t need labels explaining any of it. Someone unfamiliar with our system sees a strange journey, possibly of initiatory significance. But someone who knows the Sequence can read the grammar.

And that’s because the Sequence holds secrets.

Like that the epithets don’t actually say:

Be ecstatic. Master yourself. Tend. Endure.

They say:

Φίλος.

Dionysos is the Friend/Beloved of the person doing these things. It is φιλία (or perhaps στοργή, ἀγάπη, or ἔρως depending on the nature of one’s relationship with Dionysos) that motivates the devotee to enter the Labyrinth, and even more importantly, to make themselves worthy of undertaking such a κατάβασις. (Compare Heraklēs’ descent to that of Perithous.)

That’s the theology of the Sequence. It begins, and ends, and is driven throughout by Love. Dionysos is placed at the center of all we do, and all we are. Because he is primeval Phanēs, Eros Prōtogonos. The First and the Last. 

I really love how each image leads one into another. Though not obvious, it forms an inverted Δ with Ekstasis above, both part and apart of the sequence.

Because Ἔκστασις belongs to the Sequence by exceeding its boundary.

It is what allows us to transcend our limitations and make direct and intimate contact with the divine— an intimacy deeper and more intense than anything experienced in the flesh. 

The other three form the grounded structure below while Ἔκστασις occupies the apex above— visibly connected to everything, generated from the same sequence, but standing outside the ordinary plane of relation. The artwork’s geometry therefore performs the meaning of ek-stasis: “standing outside.”

And an inverted triangle has another useful property: everything converges downward toward a point. So depending on how one reads the movement, the image can travel in either direction:

Ekstasis ↔ Self-Mastery ↔ Stewardship ↔ Endurance ↔

It can even rise from the concentrated point of endurance/care back toward ecstatic expansion.

You don’t leave the Sequence when you step beyond yourself. Your stepping-beyond is itself one of the relations constituting the Sequence, each step of which generates the one that follows.

So transcendence isn’t escape from form. It becomes one of the things that gives the form its shape.

Which brings one of my favorite New Wine aphorisms into this constellation:

Πέρας ἑκουσίως δεχθὲν μορφὴ γίνεται.
A limitation willingly accepted becomes a form.

The boundary makes Ekstasis intelligible because there is something to step beyond.

And Ekstasis prevents the boundary from becoming a prison because the boundary can be crossed.

That’s the trellis again.

The vine requires something to grow against.

But the purpose of the trellis was never to prevent the vine from growing.

An finally, in closing, I just wanted to add that Τί φίλον Διονύσῳ isn’t merely a provocative maxim buried somewhere in the pages of New Wine.

The Lexicon can actually answer it eighteen times.

• Truth is dear to Dionysos.
• Courage is dear to Dionysos.
• Becoming is dear to Dionysos.
• Self-mastery is dear to Dionysos.
• Ecstasy is dear to Dionysos.
• Compassion is dear to Dionysos.
• Freedom is dear to Dionysos.
• Generosity is dear to Dionysos.
• Reverence is dear to Dionysos.
• Wonder is dear to Dionysos.
• Perseverance is dear to Dionysos.
• Sacred madness is dear to Dionysos.
• Hospitality is dear to Dionysos.
• Stewardship is dear to Dionysos.
• Creativity is dear to Dionysos.
• Wisdom is dear to Dionysos.
• Reciprocity is dear to Dionysos.
• Joy is dear to Dionysos.

That turns the Excellences from an externally imposed ethical code into something considerably more Dionysian: these are things the God loves.

Therefore the ethical question isn’t merely, “What rule must I obey?”

It becomes:

Τί φίλον Διονύσῳ

And that is exactly the kind of question capable of generating ethical reasoning when the rulebook runs out. 

What is dear to Dionysos?

Wonder. Becoming. Truth. Freedom.

Who is dear to Dionysos?

Those who endure. Those who tend.