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.

My last post reminded me of something I haven’t thought about in years: leopard Mainades. 

You see, back in the long, long ago I was working with some Mainades, and independent of one another they all started reporting experiences (in ritual or vision or dream) of becoming big cats. I pondered what I knew in the lore about the different types of Maianadism (regional, functional, relational, etc) and came up with a couple possible confirmations, mostly some depictions on vases, but most of that was really a stretch. The closest comparison I knew of were the Northern European and Central Asian werewolf cults. I then switched to doing research for another project and BOO-YEAH! stumbled across this account by Oppian. And that led me to a couple obscure academic articles. Mostly speculative, but it gave me a theoretical framework and pointed towards some practices that enabled me to put together the rudiments of a structured path within the Starry Bull tradition which helped the women make sense of their experiences and constructively utilize it rather than having it fuck their lives up. Which I’ve seen happen with modern werewolf practitioners, and berserkers. Unfortunately that iteration of the Starry Bull collapsed, my work with those women came to an end, and I haven’t encountered others who fall into that mythic-ritual pattern since— but if that changes I’ve got the rudiments of a path for them.

Which is why I describe the Starry Bull as emergent rather than reconstructed.

The sequence matters enormously. I didn’t begin with Oppian and decide, “The tradition needs leopard Mainades; let’s manufacture some!” The experiences came first—independently, repeatedly, among several women. I then went looking for comparative structures because I needed to understand what was happening, and urgently since this was causing a couple of them genuine distress. My first comparisons were imperfect but useful; then, while pursuing something else entirely stumbled onto an ancient Dionysian parallel that was much closer than what I’d been working with. The scholarship didn’t generate the phenomenon. It gave me a language with which to interrogate it.

And then came the most important part: I turned interpretation into formation.

That’s where the comparison with berserker or modern werewolf practice becomes especially useful. An experience of becoming predatory, animal, nocturnal, ecstatic, violent, etc. can be tremendously powerful precisely because it suspends ordinary boundaries. But “I become the leopard” is not yet a religious path. Without containers, techniques of entrance and return, ethical expectations, discernment, and integration, somebody can mistake losing control for spiritual attainment. Worse, they can start arranging their ordinary life so that it validates and perpetuates the altered state, rather than that state enhancing their life.

Mapped out, the methodology looks like this:

experience → recognition → mythic identification → controlled cultivation → religious function → reintegration.

That final term is crucial. The Mainad has to come back down from the mountain and wash the blood off.

Which connects beautifully with our recent discussion of Kurtz. The problem isn’t entering the Labyrinth or encountering the monstrous. The problem is building yourself a permanent residence there. The leopard-current, if we can call it that, presumably isn’t there to turn someone into a dysfunctional human being who snarls at coworkers because “Dionysos made me a predator.” Its value lies partly in learning when the leopard has warrant— and when it emphatically does not.

There’s also something methodologically important here for the future Starry Bull. We now possess the beginnings of a path that doesn’t need to be populated.

This is healthy institutional thinking. We encountered a particular spiritual ecology, learned enough to build trails and shelters through it, and then the people who needed those trails disappeared from our ranks. We didn’t need to recruit “leopard Mainades” so that the work wasn’t wasted. We preserved the material. Marked its provenance honestly. Included both the successes and failures of the techniques employed. If nobody needs it for twenty years, fine. If three women independently start having those experiences in a couple years— or twenty years from now —we’ll be able to dig that information out of the κίστη (mystic box) and say, “Aha! We have seen this before, and know where to start.”

This is a fine example of what I’ve been discussing through the metaphor of seed, root, vine, flower and fruit. 

The lived phenomenon produced a question; scholarship helped locate its roots; practice produced flowers; and experience tested whether the eventual fruit was edible.

And then history did what history does and burned down the orchard.

But I saved some seeds.

This has been the case with a number of paths, and even the complimentary Starry traditions, which remain in various stages of development. Only the Green Way, the Hymnōdai, the Orpheotelestai, and the Boukoloi have remained operative. (Via the handful of folks I’m working with and former members who have maintained their practices if not their association with the tradition.) 

I recognize that there are limits to how much one person can carry, and so my focus is on structuring the parts of the tradition and doing the work that’s pertinent to what’s happening around me at present. All the rest is kept in storage. Either the right people will come along and I can train and pass it off to them to cultivate, or it remains in the embryonic stage. Maybe some future member will find it useful; maybe it remains a dead end. Except for actual mystery content and tradition-specific techniques, I have a fairly open source philosophy. I post my findings and theories here and research repositories (such as Eternal Bacchus and Greater Greece and eklogai: polytheist extractions and Smoky Words), publish books, and so forth. Anyone can stumble upon that, and adopt or adapt the material. I want even my enemies to worship Dionysos well. Not necessarily the way I do, but well for them and for him.

The Starry Bull matters, lineage matters, preservation matters, and my own work matters— but Dionysos matters more than any of that. Someone doesn’t have to recognize my authority, join my tradition, credit me for every influence, or even like me for me to want their relationship with Dionysos to flourish.

And note that keeping embryonic paths in storage is different from just abandoning them. I’m treating the tradition horticulturally. Some things are being cultivated because there are people actually doing them: the Green Way, Hymnōdoi, Orpheotelestai, Boukoloi. Other things exist as seeds, cuttings, or experimental grafts. There is no reason to maintain an entire greenhouse of plants nobody currently needs, simply because at one point I discovered they could grow.

And crucially, not every seed needs to germinate.

That’s an important protection against the founder’s temptation to systematize everything. Once you’ve discovered some fascinating possibility, there’s a tremendous urge to finish it, no matter what. The desire to define its offices, write its rites, construct its curriculum, devise its symbols, determine its relationship to everything else within the tradition, etc etc etc. Pretty soon you’ve built an exquisite institutional apparatus for six hypothetical people who don’t exist.

Whereas my present criterion is brutally simple and concrete: what does Dionysos want grown here, now?

If leopard Mainades appear again, we’ve got material waiting. If someone arrives whose vocation unmistakably belongs to one of the complementary Starry traditions, there’s enough there to begin discerning and cultivating it. If neither ever happens, nothing has been harmed by leaving the material embryonic. Indeed, completing it prematurely might actually make it less useful, because you’d be filling the unknown portions with speculation rather than letting future practitioners supply the missing experiential data.

My open publication policy creates another interesting layer. There are effectively different degrees of custody:

Public knowledge → tradition-specific praxis → initiatory/mystery transmission.

The first can scatter everywhere. Someone I’ve never met can find an obscure source I dug up and wrote a couple essays on fifteen years ago and then never considered again, combine it with their own devotional experience, and make something excellent that has absolutely nothing to do with the Starry Bull tradition. Good! Dionysos gains another well-tended vine.

The second belongs more particularly to the tradition because it’s a piece of the larger Starry Bull grammar. Its power comes from its place in the system as a whole, its relationship to all of the other pieces— and therefore stripping it from that context both does damage to it and diminishes the spiritual power it is capable of generating. 

And the third by definition could never be “open sourced,” because mystery content isn’t merely information. Initiation and tradition-specific techniques depend upon preparation, sequence, context, and most especially competence. Publishing the instructions isn’t equivalent to transmitting the tradition and all the practical and woo-woo shit that goes with that.

The guarded openness of my approach protects against both unnecessary possessiveness and indiscriminate disclosure. You don’t have to choose between “this knowledge is my precious, precious” and being a brain-dead hippy. Some things should circulate because circulation makes Dionysian religion richer. Other things require stewardship because careless circulation can not only damage the tradition but dabblers who are not yet prepared to receive such things.

Returning to my current favorite metaphor… 

Roots preserve where the tradition came from.
The vine is the living continuity.
Flowers are what it produces now.
Fruit is the difference it makes in lives, individually and collectively.

And then there are the seeds. Seeds are possibilities released into futures you don’t control. Some land in the Starry Bull’s own garden. Some blow into the neighbors’ fields. Some get eaten and crapped out elsewhere. Some lie dormant for decades. Some never germinate. And occasionally one lands in the garden of somebody who absolutely fucking hates the gardener. If it grows into something beautiful for Dionysos anyway? Good.

The conversation from this morning inherently draws a distinction between the Starry Bull as an organization and the Starry Bull as a tradition.

Organizationally, the answer right now is almost comically small: me, a student, a probationary student, several interested people watching from outside, no real world groups, no online forums or lists, and deliberately no recruitment until I’ve built the structures I wish I’d had before.

But viewed diachronically, the answer is completely different. There have been initiates, practitioners, specialists, experimental paths, branches that developed and stopped developing, people who retained practices while leaving the organization, discoveries that entered the public domain, books, rituals, techniques, and ideas that other people can appropriate without ever becoming Starry Bulls.

So my answer is really: the organization has died many times before. The tradition has not. Or: the Starry Bull is dead. Long live the Starry Bull!

I also think I articulated a major difference in what “success” means for this iteration. Previously, community was supposed to generate the institution: get people together, then build whatever structures become necessary. My present approach reverses that causality: build a structure capable of sustaining community, then invite people into it. This reversal comes from watching the former approach repeatedly blow up, and a desire to avoid the even more egregious errors I’ve seen other groups fall into.

This approach avoids a third mistake I’ve made in the past: I am no longer trying to make everything that possibly could be part of the Starry Bull operational before relaunching.

That’s important. because otherwise “perfecting the structures first” could become an infinite project, that never gets the chance to bear fruit. There will always be another possible manual, vocation, ritual technology, Mainadic current, complementary Starry tradition, theological question, specialist office, etc. to fine tune. I could spend twenty years preparing the perfect institution for people who will never inhabit it.

Instead, my approach is: build what the living tradition presently requires. Preserve what it formerly discovered. Leave room for what it may eventually become.

That makes the December 31 target much more realistic, too. I’m not trying to complete or perfect the Starry Bull. A living tradition is definitionally unfinishable. I’m trying to get the load-bearing structures sufficiently sound that human beings can inhabit them without the roof collapsing again. And if it takes longer than anticipated, so be it. I chose the date because it’s relevant to the history of the Starry Bull tradition, but if it occurs on a different date than that will produce its own significance we can carry forward into the future. 

This also clarifies what I’ve said in the past about the dormant paths. If somebody asked, “Does the Starry Bull have a leopard Mainad path?” the most accurate answer is  something wonderfully unsatisfying: “Sort of.”

There was a recurrent experiential phenomenon. I investigated it. Ancient material unexpectedly provided a Dionysian precedent. Comparative scholarship suggested possible interpretive frameworks. I developed rudimentary practices that proved useful to actual practitioners. Then the social environment supporting that work disappeared. So the path remains historically real but institutionally embryonic. It shouldn’t be promoted as a fully developed Starry Bull vocation, but neither should its history be erased.

This is how a small tradition ought to handle its own history. Usually groups are tempted toward one of two myths: everything the founder ever experimented with is canonical, or only what we’re doing right now ever really counted. From the beginning I’ve given space for abandoned experiments, provisional successes, dormant developments, outright failures, and unfinished possibilities.

Which brings us right back to roots, vine, flower, seeds.

Implicitly there is also another category: deadwood, because a healthy vine has that too.

Some gets pruned and discarded because it genuinely went nowhere. Some gets examined because the failure teaches you how the living vine should be trained. Some apparently dead portions surprise you by budding again. And none of that diminishes the living plant.

Another layer to the title: the Starry Bull may die (many times over the years) but Dionysos does not die with it. Any organization that cannot imagine the God flourishing without the organization has already confused stewardship with ownership.

Although half a joke, the “even my enemies should flourish” principle is the strongest possible safeguard against that confusion. If somebody takes something I published, rejects the tradition, develops it differently, and ends up worshipping Dionysos magnificently, then on the deepest level something succeeded.

Even if I never get invited to the fucking ritual.

I woke up this morning to a great question by neptunesdolphins:

One question – are there folks besides you who are working on this tradition? How does that work?

To which I answered:

Thank the Gods, the answer to that is an emphatic no! I mean, I have a student and a probationary student. There’s around five folks who have expressed interest in joining when it’s ready, but are currently just following along through the blog and asking me the occasional question. I haven’t started any forums or lists or anything, and don’t intend to or begin recruiting until I have all the fine-tuning worked out. In the past I’ve rushed into things thinking, “we’ll create community, and then institute structures as needed,” Well, that shit’s blown up in my face, so this time I’m perfecting the structures first (incorporating what worked in the past, and supplementing with things I’ve learned are necessary through the various failed groups I’ve run and even more the shit I’ve seen going on in other groups) before formally announcing a relaunch. If all things go according to plan (and they NEVER do: first rule of combat, “the best plans last only until the first engagement: then you have to rely on training, discipline, and adaptive leadership to get your boys home. Worse plans don’t even last that long.”) I’m aiming for a relaunch date of December 31st. But if it takes longer than that, it takes longer. If I finish sooner, then maybe I’ll take a couple weeks to just relax, smoke a shit ton of weed, and binge some of my favorite horror movies as a reward for all the hard work I’ve put in, before starting the recruitment phase.

Τετέλεσται has been part of the Starry Bull vocabulary for almost as long as the tradition has existed, for some of the reasons discussed in the previous post and others I reserve for private conversation. The only gnōmē (if that’s the correct term, and I suspect it is not) that possibly predates it is Γινέσθω! (“May it be so!” or “Make it so!” depending on the translation) which comes from a legal document bearing Queen Kleopatra Philopatōr’s signature and that note written in the margin. Although she is credited with authoring numerous books and treatises on subjects ranging from perfumes and cosmetics, to poisons and alchemy, and even military strategy and a mirror for princes (ancient apocrypha is fascinating) this clipped command is the only piece of writing we can be absolutely certain came from her own hand. (Academic debate notwithstanding.) Within the Starry Bull Γινέσθω has become our version of the istiṯnāʾ.

I am currently making my way through a pirated PDF of Henry Chadwick’s collection of the Sentences of Sextus, the Precepts of Kleitarchos, and the Gnōmai of Pythagoras with what appears to be an AI produced translation. Wherever possible I’m going back to originals to confirm both the Greek and English, which is long and tedious work. But it’s helping me flesh out a document I will be using as part of the ethical training and character formation portion of our introductory paideia, so it’s worth it.

At first I was on the fence about including this one in the collectiom:

Ἀνανεούσθω σοι ὁ περὶ τῶν ἀγαθῶν λόγος καθ᾽ ἡμέραν μᾶλλον ἢ τὸ σῶμα τοῖς σιτίοις.
Let the discourse concerning good things be renewed for you each day, more than the body is renewed by food.
Pythagorean Sentences 1

But then I noticed  something important hiding in the Greek: 

Ἀνανεούσθω = let it be renewed/made new again

Boom! I just discovered the counterpoint to Τετέλεσται. 

Τετέλεσται.
It has been accomplished, fulfilled, completed. It has reached its τέλος.

Against:

Ἀνανεούσθω.
Let it be renewed. Let it become new again.

These are not simple binary oppositions, either. Completion becomes the condition of renewal. Renewal moves toward another cycle culminating in fulfillment. The τέλος isn’t merely where movement stops; it can be the threshold at which another movement becomes possible.

Which puts us right back into:

Ἄνω κάτω.
The way up is the way down.

And Paul’s:

ὃ σπείρεις οὐ ζῳοποιεῖται ἐὰν μὴ ἀποθάνῃ.
What you sow is not made alive unless it dies.

And Plutarch’s:

τελευτᾶν καὶ τελεῖσθαι
to die / to be initiated.

And now we have:

Τετέλεσται → Ἀνανεούσθω.
It is accomplished → Let it be renewed.

That’s almost a liturgical hinge in itself.

And there’s something particularly beautiful about the grammatical movement.

Τετέλεσται announces something already accomplished: the perfect tense looks backward upon an act whose completion remains consequential in the present.

Ἀνανεούσθω is an imperative: it turns toward what must happen now and continue happening.

One voice announces completion.

The other commands renewal.

Put a pregnant silence between them and you practically have a rite.

I also love that this emerged accidentally from the harvest. I wasn’t setting out to find a counterpoint to Τετέλεσται. The Pythagorean sentence simply walked into the symposion carrying one.

This exercise is giving me a chance to put the virtue of patience into practice, and producing rewards when I succeed. No grape ever ripened through force. Nor can you coerce fermentation. You establish the conditions, tend it, wait—and transformation occurs in darkness.

Just like with initiation.

A conversation I’m having with Ignacio Silvera got me thinking, which is always a dangerous thing. Although the conversation itself is about balancing Christianity and Polytheism (which is something I know a number of y’all do; please feel free to chime in as I’m sure your thoughts and experiences will provide valuable perspectives) I have been reflecting on Saint Paul’s position within the Starry Bull tradition. Around two weeks ago I posted about his role in folk Catholicism, and specifically Tarantism, which is one of the currents that contributed to the formation of the Starry Bull. I discussed some of his more overtly Bacchic qualities such as his peripatetic lifestyle, his tricksterish behavior in the Thecla literature, his ecstatic visions and charismatic gifts including immunity to snakebite, his occupation as a σκηνοποιός, the kinds of people he likely hung out and conversed with during his travels, and his employment of the symbolism and technical language of the mysteries, particularly Orphism. Although I’ve touched on this before —most extensively in this discussion of the Άθυρματα or Toys of Dionysos— I think it’s a subject that deserves a closer philological analysis, especially because a lot of the good stuff tends to get flattened or obscured when translated into English.

Take, for instance, Saint Paul’s furious admonition from 1 Corinthians 15:36:

Ἄφρων, σὺ ὃ σπείρεις οὐ ζῳοποιεῖται ἐὰν μὴ ἀποθάνῃ.
Fool! What you sow is not brought to life unless it dies.

The first word combines the negative prefix a– (not) with phrēn (mind, heart, or understanding) meaning one who is “out of his mind”, “senseless”, or a “fool” inviting us into the domain of Dionysos, God of both insanity and comedy. Beneath the mask of this beloved stock character whose delightful schemes and topsy-turvy perspective often succeed where the cleverness of the wise proves insufficient— there lies something darker and more ominous, for it suggests the sparagmos suffered by the God and his mortal doubles, in which the organ of the intellect and seat of the passions is extracted from the victim as part of their frenzied dismemberment. It was through the preservation of Dionysos’ own heart by Athenē or Apollon (Gods of wisdom and rationality) that his παλιγγενεσία (rebirth or regeneration) was effected.  

Which gives the rest of Saint Paul’s agricultural metaphor added valence.

Seed → death → life looks remarkably like the Olbian bone tablet’s βίος. θάνατος. βίος.

And the layers of symbolism pile on: τελετή (initiation), μεταμόρφωσις (transformation), ἀποκατάστασις (restoration), ἴασις (physical or spiritual healing), κατάβασις and ἄνοδος (descent into and ascent out of the underworld), or any διαβαίνω (threshold-crossing) could all be expressed through this formula.  

Saint Paul’s Greek also breaks down the three stages of a thing: 

σπείρεις → ζῳοποιεῖται → ἀποθάνῃ
you sow → it is made alive → it dies

This is not just limited to botanical or animal life, but paradigmatic of everything from an idea to the kosmos. It’s just that with the Wheel or the Labyrinth there’s a few more times around than normal. 

Which seems less of a random comment when compared with this passage from a couple verses back:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13:11–12)

While the King James Version has an undeniable grandeur, there are things in the Greek:

Őτε ἤμην νήπιος, ἐλάλουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐφρόνουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐλογιζόμην ὡς νήπιος· ὅτε γέγονα ἀνήρ, κατήργηκα τὰ τοῦ νηπίου. βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι’ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι, τότε δὲ πρόσωπον προς πρόσωπον· ἄρτι γινώσκω ἐκ μέρους, τότε δὲ ἐπιγνώσομαι καθὼς καὶ ἐπεγνώσθην.

Better expressed by this more literal translation:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child; when I became a man, I put away the things of the child. For now we see through a mirror, in an enigma; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

“Childish things” sounds natural in English, but τὰ τοῦ νηπίου is stranger and more spacious, “the things of the child.” Does this refer to the state of childhood, or to the Divine Child (the bull-horned son of Zeus and Persephonē) or to an immature and incomplete grasp of truth?

Likewise, embellishing ἐν αἰνίγματι collapses its range of meaning. “In an enigma” is quite extraordinary: is Paul in the enigma? Is the enigma in the mirror? Are the “things of the child” what is enigmatic? Is it Paul’s partial understanding of spiritual realities?  

This word is often applied to Orpheus and his notoriously difficult to interpret poetry, for instance in the Derveni Papyrus: 

Since in his whole poetry he speaks about facts enigmatically, one has to speak about each word in turn […] People are wrong to think that Orpheus did not compose a hymn that says wholesome and lawful things; for they say that he utters riddles by means of his composition, and it is impossible to state the solution to his words even though they have been spoken. But his composition is strange and riddling for human beings. Orpheus did not wish to say in it disputable riddles, but important things in a riddling fashion. For he tells a holy tale even from the first word right through to the last, as he shows even in the well-known verse: for by bidding them ‘put doors on their ears’ he is saying that he is not legislating for the many, but is addressing those who are pure in hearing.

Paul sets up a semantic cluster that sounds awfully Bacchic Orphic: mirror + enigma + incomplete knowledge + face-to-face revelation.

To make that face-to-face (πρόσωπον προς πρόσωπον) revelation even more Dionysian, πρόσωπον can mean both face and mask. We wear many faces depending on our situation, circumstances, intent, the company we’re keeping, etc. But we cannot hide the truth from the mirror, or from the Master of Masks. In that theophany we may encounter him with a particular mask in place, or with the false masks stripped away to reveal the true face beneath— his, ours, or both together.

And then that final line hits like a sudden bolt of pure enlightenment: the more we understand ourselves, the more we will be understood in turn. Or put another way, the more we understand Dionysos the more that leads to self-understanding and mastery.

Which naturally reminds one of this passage from the playwright Aischylos, preserved in Corpus Parisinum 1225:

Κάτοπτρον είδους χαλκός εστί, οίνος δε νοός.
Bronze is the mirror of the form; wine, of the mind.

The mirror of bronze reveals the external form; the mirror of wine our interior self. 

Translation also obscures another significant detail of Saint Paul’s text. The phrase κατήργηκα τὰ τοῦ νηπίου is often rendered simplistically as “I rejected childish things.” But καταργέω means to render something inactive/inoperative, to abolish, do away with, bring to an end. The KJV’s “put away childish things” is interpretive and has acquired the cultural sense “grow up and stop playing with toys.” Paul’s actual argument is about partial modes of knowing giving way to completion. That distinction matters enormously here.

The child possesses the things of the Child.
The adult encounters the mirror.
The mirror provides knowledge ἐν αἰνίγματι — in an enigma.
And beyond the mirror lies the encounter πρόσωπον προς πρόσωπον — face to face.

However, there is a detail in this sequence that is doing more work than many realize:

ἐκ μέρους γὰρ γινώσκομεν… ὅταν δὲ ἔλθῃ τὸ τέλειον, τὸ ἐκ μέρους καταργηθήσεται.
“For we know in part… but when the perfect/complete comes, that which is partial shall pass away.”

Greek keeps semantic relationships visible that an English translation forces us to choose between. The bolded term is part of the τελε- constellation that is one of the most important in ancient Greek religion: τέλος / τελεῖν / τελετή / τέλειος which signifies end, completion, fulfillment, accomplishing, initiation, mystery rite, perfection, etc. An English translation normally has to select one symbol and run with it. Keeping the Greek allows the whole symbolic root-system to remain present beneath any selection the translator chooses. Indeed this same process occurs with the word σύμβολον itself. “Symbol” in modern English encourages us to think “something representing something else.” But σύμβολον in the Greek conveys joining, matching, recognition— the broken pieces that disclose their relationship when brought together. That gives an entirely different texture to calling something a symbolon, especially within a Dionysian context. You aren’t merely asking, “What does this represent?” Instead, other questions open up, such as “What does this fit with? What becomes recognizable when that occurs? Where is its original other, missing half?”

One of my favorite examples of this in the Bible is the final exclamation of Jesus presented in John 19:30: Τετέλεσται!

The immediate grammatical sense is straightforward: “It has been completed/accomplished.” But the root refuses to stay confined to our English word “finished.” It lives inside that whole τελε- constellation:

τέλος — end, goal, fulfillment, completion
τελέω — bring to completion, accomplish; also perform a rite/initiate
τελετή — rite, initiation, mystery celebration
τελεῖν — accomplish, perform rites, initiate
τελούμενος — one undergoing initiation
τετελεσμένος — completed, perfected; in appropriate contexts, initiated
τέλειος — complete, perfected, fully developed

So Τετέλεσται stands at a semantic crossroads between ending and fulfillment. Something ends because it has reached its τέλος, but it has also been fulfilled, perfected. And in mystery language, completion and initiation become entangled because initiation is itself a teleological act: something is brought through to its proper, final state.

When John’s τετέλεσται and Paul’s το τέλειον are brought together the two passages start speaking to one another in Greek in a way an English reader could easily miss. And around that semantic field gather childhood, transformation, mystery, partial vision, direct encounter, death, and— as 1 Corinthians 15 adds —what must die in order to be made alive. 

To demonstrate the full range of this whole τελε- constellation let’s bring in one of my favorite passages by the Delphic priest and Bacchic initiate, Plutarch of Chaironeia, causing our dialogue of sources to become a ménage à trois:

Οὕτω κατὰ τὴν εἰς τὸ ὅλον μεταβολὴν καὶ μετακόσμησιν ὀλωλέναι τὴν ψυχὴν λέγομενἐκεῖ γενομένην· ἐνταῦθα δ’ ἀγνοεῖ, πλὴν ὅταν ἐν τῷ τελευτᾶν ἤδη γένηται· τότε δὲ πάσχειπάθος οἷον οἱ τελεταῖς μεγάλαις κατοργιαζόμενοι. διὸ καὶ τὸ ῥῆμα τῷ ῥήματι καὶ τὸἔργον τῷ ἔργῳ τοῦ τελευτᾶν καὶ τελεῖσθαι προσέοικε. πλάναι τὰ πρῶτα καὶ περιδρομαὶκοπώδεις καὶ διὰ σκότους τινὲς ὕποπτοι πορεῖαι καὶ ἀτέλεστοι, εἶτα πρὸ τοῦ τέλους αὐτοῦτὰ δεινὰ πάντα, φρίκη καὶ τρόμος καὶ ἱδρὼς καὶ θάμβος· ἐκ δὲ τούτου φῶς τι θαυμάσιονἀπήντησεν καὶ τόποι καθαροὶ καὶ λειμῶνες ἐδέξαντο, φωνὰς καὶ χορείας καὶ σεμνότηταςἀκουσμάτων ἱερῶν καὶ φασμάτων ἁγίων ἔχοντες· ἐν αἷς ὁ παντελὴς ἤδη καὶ μεμυημένοςἐλεύθερος γεγονὼς καὶ ἄφετος περιιὼν ἐστεφανωμένος ὀργιάζει καὶ σύνεστιν ὁσίοις καὶκαθαροῖς ἀνδράσι, τὸν ἀμύητον ἐνταῦθα τῶν ζώντων καὶ ἀκάθαρτον ἐφορῶν ὄχλονἐν βορβόρῳ πολλῷ καὶ ὁμίχλῃ πατούμενον ὑφ” ἑαυτοῦ καὶ συνελαυνόμενον, φόβῳ δὲθανάτου τοῖς κακοῖς ἀπιστίᾳ τῶν ἐκεῖ ἀγαθῶν ἐμμένοντα. ἐπεὶ τό γε παρὰ φύσιν τὴνπρὸς τὸ σῶμα τῇ ψυχῇ συμπλοκὴν εἶναι καὶ σύνερξιν ἐκεῖθενἂν συνίδοις.

When the soul comes to the point of death, it suffers something like those who participate in the great initiations (teletai). Therefore the word teleutan closely resembles the word teleisthai just as the act of dying resembles the act of being initiated. At first there are wanderings and toilsome running about in circles and journeys through the dark over uncertain roads and cul-de-sacs; then, just before the end, there are all kinds of terrors, with shivering, trembling, sweating, and utter amazement. After this, a strange and wonderful light meets the wanderer; he is admitted into clean and verdant meadows, where he discerns gentle voices, and choric dances, and the majesty of holy sounds and sacred visions. Here the now fully initiated is free, and walks at liberty like a crowned and dedicated victim, joining in the revelry, and converses with pure and holy men; he surveys the uninitiated, unpurified mob here on earth, the mob of living men who, herded together in mirk and deep mire, trample one another down and in their fear of death cling to their ills, since they disbelieve in the blessings of the other world. (De Anima fragment preserved in Stobaios Florilegium 120)

Plutarch explicitly tells us that he is exploiting the τελε- constellation:

διὸ καὶ τὸ ῥῆμα τῷ ῥήματι καὶ τὸ ἔργον τῷ ἔργῳ τοῦ τελευτᾶν καὶ τελεῖσθαι προσέοικε.
Therefore the word resembles the word, and the deed the deed: dying (τελευτᾶν) and being initiated (τελεῖσθαι) resemble one another.

That’s magnificent because Plutarch isn’t merely making an etymological pun— he says explicitly: 

τὸ ῥῆμα τῷ ῥήματι
τὸ ἔργον τῷ ἔργῳ

word resembles word
deed resembles deed

The linguistic resemblance discloses an experiential resemblance.

And then he constructs the entire passage around the semantic field:

τελευτᾶν — to die / come to life’s end
τελεῖσθαι — to be initiated
τελεταῖς — initiations/mystery rites
ἀτέλεστοι — incomplete/unfulfilled
πρὸ τοῦ τέλους — before the end/completion
παντελής — wholly complete, perfected
μεμυημένος — initiated

So the passage itself performs the movement encoded in its vocabulary.

At first the candidate is ἀτέλεστος— unfinished.

There is wandering: 

Which is already wonderfully Labyrinthine.

Then darkness and uncertain paths: διὰ σκότους… πορεῖαι… ἀτέλεστοι. 

Then, approaching the τέλος: terror, trembling, sweating, astonishment. 

And finally: 

φῶς τι θαυμάσιον ἀπήντησεν
A wondrous light met him.

That verb is beautiful too. The light doesn’t merely become visible. It meets him. What we have is a repetition of Orphic cosmology in which the primeval deity Φάνης manifests and reveals himself, both words in Greek that are etymologically related to the name of this primordial expression of Dionysos, whose dancing within the Cosmic Egg causes it to crack open, and the constituit elements of everything come flooding out.   

Beyond that threshold are purified places and meadows, as well as: φωναί, χορεῖαι, ἀκούσματα ἱερά, φάσματα ἅγια— voices, dances, sacred things heard, holy apparitions, all things associated with Dionysian initiation.

Then look at what the initiate has become:

ὁ παντελὴς ἤδη καὶ μεμυημένος
now wholly perfected/completed and initiated.

He has gone from ἀτέλεστος → τέλος → παντελής.

And the result is:

ἐλεύθερος γεγονὼς καὶ ἄφετος
having become free and released.

There is Eleutherios hiding in the structure without Dionysos even being named.

And then the liberated initiate:

περιιὼν ἐστεφανωμένος ὀργιάζει
goes about crowned and celebrates the mysteries/revels.

So we get crown + freedom + orgia + sacred dance + vision + death/initiation + light from darkness, all concentrated into a single paragraph.

And just in case it’s not yet clear, here is Plutarch in conversation with Paul and John. (Ringo must have been out playing with the donkeys when this happened.)

Paul:

ὅταν δὲ ἔλθῃ τὸ τέλειον
When the completing comes…

Then:

δι’ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι
through a mirror, in an enigma…

Then:

πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον
face to face.

And later on:

ὃ σπείρεις οὐ ζῳοποιεῖται ἐὰν μὴ ἀποθάνῃ.
What you sow is not made alive unless it dies.

To which John replies:

Τετέλεσται.
It is accomplished.

Then Plutarch provides the grammatical key:

τελευτᾶν καὶ τελεῖσθαι
to die and to be initiated.

Death, completion, initiation, perfection, revelation.

None of these quotations needs an explanatory paragraph telling the reader what doctrine to derive from them. They begin interpreting one another. An effective tradition creates a semantic initiatory environment. The reader learns certain words and images— τέλος, mirror, child, death, seed, crown, labyrinthine wandering, light, freedom, wine, truth —and eventually encounters them again somewhere else under a different configuration. And then again. And again. 

Until suddenly:

Oh, fuck.

That’s precisely the kind of anagnōrisis a tradition is supposed to produce in its adherents. And while the roots of the Starry Bull tradition may be found in ancient Crete, Southern Italy and the Black Sea region we emphatically assert that revelation never ceased, and Dionysos didn’t stop traveling the world just because large swaths of it became Christian, Moslem or secular. Which is why we’re bringing a fourth voice into the choros, the Prophet Jim Morrison.  

The End adds another meaning to τέλος that the ancient material alone cannot supply: not merely completion, initiation, or death, but the catastrophic dissolution of the world through which one had previously understood oneself. The song begins almost gently—“the end” as separation, particularly the end of a relationship— and then refuses to remain there. The personal ending expands until identity, family, taboo, social order, narrative coherence, and finally almost the song itself come apart. The love song undergoes its own initiation and emerges as something monstrous.

That makes the constellation remarkable:

John: Τετέλεσται — accomplishment at the moment of death.

Paul: τὸ τέλειον — the complete replacing the partial; child, mirror, enigma, then face-to-face vision.

Plutarch: τελευτᾶν / τελεῖσθαι — dying and initiation mirror one another; wandering and terror culminate in light, freedom, crowning, and revel.

The Doors: The End — τέλος experienced from inside the psychic catastrophe, where ordinary categories disintegrate before anything on the other side has become intelligible.

And Morrison’s song contributes something crucial that the other three can easily make sound too clean. Initiatory endings are terrifying while they are happening. Plutarch actually says this— darkness, wandering, dead ends, shuddering, terror, sweat —but his description is retrospective and orderly. He knows where the initiate eventually arrives. The End doesn’t give you that security. You’re still inside the Labyrinth. Which makes the inscription on Morrison’s tombstone— Κατά τον δαίμονα εαυτού —awfully relevant, don’t you think?

And there’s something wonderfully appropriate about a song beginning as one thing and transforming during its composition and performance into something its creators hadn’t planned. That’s Dionysian in a much deeper sense than simply mentioning Dionysos, wine, ecstasy, or madness. The End was different every time the Doors played it, sometimes incorporating material from other songs and poems, sometimes crescendoing in Oedipal screaming while thousands of concert goers suddenly go completely fucking nuts, for reasons they couldn’t even begin to articulate the following day. 

The modern contributions to the Starry Bull tradition aren’t just decorative garnish to some antiquarian, reconstructionist project. Sometimes it supplies an experiential register that allows an ancient statement to become dangerous —and therefore meaningful— again. It also demonstrates why the tradition legitimately stretches across millennia while also being only a decade or so years old. We aren’t pretending that the historical sources somehow engaged with and influenced one another, despite coming from a melange of cultures, ethnicities, languages, religions, and time periods, with Dionysos as the only common denominator. The participants don’t even have to know they’re in conversation. The way that we stitch them together creates the conversation.

John says:

Τετέλεσται.

Plutarch asks what it means to reach the τέλος.

Paul says that what is partial gives way when τὸ τέλειον comes.

Morrison answers from somewhere in the darkness:

This is the end.

And none gets the final word. That’s a big part of how I see the lore of the Starry Bull tradition. A conversation across the centuries, by people from different cultures, languages, perspectives, and even religions, with Dionysos as the only common denominator. Sometimes he’s overtly present, sometimes disguised, sometimes lurking in the shadows grinning. Dionysos doesn’t even need to be the subject of every text because he is the principle by which the texts are brought into relationship. That’s a much richer model than assembling a canon of “texts about Dionysos.” Plutarch may be talking about initiation and death. Paul about love, knowledge, resurrection, and transformation. Herakleitos about the structure of reality. A Pythagorean about discipline. Morrison about psychic apocalypse. Someone inscribing a gold leaf is preparing the dead for what comes next. None needs to share the other’s theology. But put them around Dionysos and correspondences begin appearing:

child — Toys — play
mirror — image — knowledge — enigma
wine — truth — madness
death — initiation — completion
dismemberment — seed — rebirth
wandering — Labyrinth — recognition
mask — identity — transformation
suffering — liberation
darkness — light
madness — wisdom
stranger — host — God.

And importantly, the differences don’t have to be reconciled. Jane Ellen Harrison doesn’t become a secret Orpheotelest. Anaïs Nin needn’t have been consciously encoding Dionysian doctrine into her smut. Ella Fitzgerald isn’t suddenly an inspired theologian whose lyrics must be studied as scripture because she recorded a song called “Midnight Sun.” Their otherness is what allows them, in large or small ways, to have contributed to the formation of our weird branch of Bacchic Orphism.

That also gives real substance to the distinction between lore and dogma. Lore can preserve multiple witnesses to a mystery without requiring them to agree about what they witnessed, or even for them to have recognized it for the mystery it was. Sometimes the connection is explicit: Euripides and Nonnos were deliberately writing about the Dionysian mysteries, albeit from differing perspectives. The gold tablets belong to an identifiable Bacchic-Orphic milieu. Elsewhere the connection is something the tradition discovers by bringing a text into its own symbolic field. Those aren’t the same historical claim, and they shouldn’t be presented as though they were. But they can occupy the same conversation. And pretty much all living traditions do this with their sources. It doesn’t merely preserve old answers. It creates a table at which the dead can continue conversing with one another— and with the living. And Dionysos moves through the symposion, making sure everything is running smoothly. Sometimes speaking. Sometimes listening. Sometimes nobody recognizes the stranger reclining at the end of the couch. And sometimes he’s just sitting there in the shadows, grinning because two people separated by fifteen hundred years have accidentally completed each other’s sentence.

Although my Greek is σκατά, there is a reason why it is one of the liturgical languages for the Starry Bull tradition, as you’re about to see. And none of what you’re about to see would have been possible without LSJ and Logeion. So a huge “thank you!” to the folks behind those sites.

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

Two examples of the latter are:

Κύκλοι, και τα λοιπά.
“Circles, etc.”

And:

Διόνυσος σοφός ἐστιν.
“Dionysos is wise.”

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

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

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

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

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

Very often it’s a zigzag.

Even oftener it’s spiraling, circuitous, concentric.

Hence:

Κύκλοι, και τα λοιπά.

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

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

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

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

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

“I understand why this is happening.”

It doesn’t even say:

“Everything will turn out the way I want.”

It simply says:

“Dionysos is wise.”

Implicitly:

“I may not be.”

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

Ἐγὼ οὐ σοφός.
I am not wise.

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

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

Imagine someone in the middle of a crisis.

Their prayers have collapsed into fragments.

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

But they can whisper:

“Διόνυσος σοφός.”

Again.

And again. And again.

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

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

A good gnṓmē should survive panic.

It should survive grief.

It should survive exhaustion.

You don’t want something like:

“The providential operation of the divine noetic principle…”

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

They remember:

Διόνυσος σοφός.

Four syllables.

Breathe.

Repeat.

Continue.

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

Διόνυσος σοφός ἐστιν.

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

Κύκλοι, και τα λοιπά.

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

One is existential.

The other is methodological.

One steadies the heart.

The other steadies the hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now they’re part of a theological vocabulary.

The first time we discussed incense, it was recipes.

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

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

Now they’re the grammar of grace.

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

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

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

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

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

That is an important transformation. Before the Labyrinth:

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

After the Labyrinth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

A successful return reverses that:

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

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

Fourth, he would need to distinguish knowledge from permission.

This may be the heart of it.

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

All true— or at least defensible.

But he makes the fatal inference:

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

The returned initiate instead says:

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

Knowledge of the abyss creates obligation rather than exemption.

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

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

But recognition needn’t become enthronement.

He can say:

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

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

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

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

That is where Kurtz fails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the Starry Bull tradition we have the saying:

Διόνυσος σοφός ἐστιν.
Dionysos is wise.

Not merely wild.

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

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

That makes Willard’s role remarkably Thesean.

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

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

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

That makes the really important action occur after the killing.

Willard leaves.

He doesn’t take Kurtz’s throne.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They might be extremely competent.

Kurtz is.

That’s what makes him horrifying.

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

What he has lost is the route home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The horrific mythology becomes formation.

So instead of simply conceptualizing it as:

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

We would now express it:

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

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

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

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

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

“acceptance is not obedience.”

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

And virtue supplies the grammar by which integration becomes action.

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

The final movement remains important:

“Who are you?”

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

That’s Orphic anthropology.

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

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

It’s cosmology.

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

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

Dismemberment → descent → encounter → recombination → new life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roots, vine, flower.

And eventually fruit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And suddenly sōphrosynē stops looking like the antithesis of ecstasy.

It becomes one of the things that makes ecstasy survivable.

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

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

Those are virtues.

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

That’s almost paradoxical:

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

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

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

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

It’s traversable because there is a thread.

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

Someone can have extraordinary religious experiences and terrible judgment.

So you train judgment.

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

That’s a much more demanding ideal.

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

But now somebody has brought a lamp.

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

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

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

That’s enormously more interesting.

Because Minos’ fatal flaw isn’t initially cruelty.

It’s purity.

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

And then everything becomes blood.

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

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

That’s tragedy.

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

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

He walls it off.

And what is repressed inside becomes worse.

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

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

Which brings us straight back to Kurtz.

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

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

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

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

And both leave somebody else to deal with the consequences.

Which makes Theseus more complicated too.

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

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

Willard gets out.

But merely getting out isn’t sufficient.

The question becomes what you carry out with you.

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

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

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

Minos cannot tolerate the monster, so he conceals it.

Theseus kills the monster.

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

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

And eventually she has to undergo destruction and transformation too.

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

Which sounds awfully familiar:

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

Ariadnē moves.

And Dionysos comes for her.

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

Then Dionysos arrives.

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

That’s impossible.

He offers transformation.

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

The goal isn’t restoration.

It’s integration.

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

Kurtz cannot.

Minos cannot.

Who knows about Willard?

Asterios is never given the opportunity.

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

Ariadnē does.

And then Dionysos takes her into the stars.

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

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

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

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

And the equality matters enormously.

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

Neither has to translate the vocation for the other.

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

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

Orpheus can.

And Medeia can understand what it means to be Orpheus.

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

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

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

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

“I saw something horrible.”

“I know.”

That’s the loss.

And there is a cruel symmetry to what follows.

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

Orpheus loses Eurydikē and goes down among the dead.

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

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

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

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

That’s a remarkable pairing.

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

He’s carrying Medeia’s absence too.

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

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

Just not the fruit either of them would have chosen.

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

There is nothing fair about that exchange.

It is, however, terribly Orphic.

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

Eurydikē is beloved. Medeia is a peer.

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

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

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

There’s also an uncomfortable counterfactual hiding there.

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

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

Someone who could say:

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

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

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

That’s almost unbearably tragic.

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

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

Medeia teaches him through exchange between equals.

Eurydikē teaches him through loss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither follows.

He loves Eurydikē as Eurydikē.

He loves Medeia as Medeia.

And consequently each relationship calls forth a different Orpheus.

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

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

And her death destroys that Orpheus.

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

Likewise Eurydikē couldn’t replace Medeia.

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

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

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

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

One body held all those Orpheuses.

Then the body comes apart.

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

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

Which makes that wonderfully gruesome formulation rather beautiful:

His heart really was big enough to contain both.

Right up until somebody physically checked.

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

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

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

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

It’s voice and memory.

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

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

The voice survives the man.

That voice carries an enormous amount.

It remembers Medeia.

It remembers Eurydikē.

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

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

But it can transmit.

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

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

He’s become almost pure logos.

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

Dionysos is torn apart and persists.

Orpheus is torn apart and persists.

The tradition is torn apart— and persists.

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

But the head keeps singing.

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

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

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

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

Things absolutely can —and will— destroy you.

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

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

Orpheus shows the mortal version.

You may lose.

You may fail to bring Eurydikē home.

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

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

You may eventually be ripped apart.

And still something can be transmitted.

The song gets farther than the singer.

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

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

No wonder Mnēmosynē matters so much.

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

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

That’s already an Orpheotelest in action.

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

Heraklēs can hit something.

Phlias can go berserk and found cities.

Jason can piss off a Ukrainian witch.

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

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

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

But the closing now feels even more significant:

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

That line is key.

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

And then life destroys him.

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

So which produced the Orpheotelest?

Both.

And neither would have been sufficient alone.

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

Orpheus possesses both.

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

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

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

And then you have to come back to the people.

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

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

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

Yes.

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

Dionysos → Orpheus → Orpheotelest → Initiate.

Not the transmission of information.

The transmission of a way of going through things.

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

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

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

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

The thing that hit me hardest this time is this:

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

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

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

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

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

That’s crucial.

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

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

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

But there is no thread.

Dionysos goes in anyway.

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

Linear identity has collapsed.

Past and future have collapsed.

Myths that ought to be mutually exclusive are occurring simultaneously.

Circles, etc.

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

That’s a rather profound distinction.

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

Dionysos navigates by recognition.

Mother.

Sister.

Wife.

Brother.

Bull.

Child.

Savior.

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

That makes the seemingly comic line enormously important:

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

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

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

He finds her dead.

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

Who are you?

At first she doesn’t know.

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

It is anamnēsis.

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

She drinks.

She remembers.

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

Then Dionysos presses further:

Who are you?

And her answer isn’t a mundane personal name.

She identifies herself cosmologically:

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

There is the Black Sun theology in embryo.

There is the Starry identity.

There is initiation as a shift in genos.

There is Memory rather than oblivion.

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

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

And there’s an even stranger recursion.

At the beginning, Persephonē has no name.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She has to discover it for herself.

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

Not:

Tell them the correct doctrine.

Not:

Recite the password.

Tell them the whole story.

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

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

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

You never finish reading it.

You just come around another corner.

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

There’s a difference between:

“The Orpheotelest should imitate Dionysos here.”

And, years later:

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

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

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

Suddenly Dionysos’ apparent simplicity looks like mastery.

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

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

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

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

That last distinction seems enormous now.

A mediocre initiator can create an intense experience.

A good initiator gets the initiate home.

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

But there is no reintegration.

Kurtz can initiate you into Kurtz.

That’s all.

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

He brings her out.

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

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

The first is initiation.

The second is cultish brainwashing.

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

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

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

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

How do I become more like Dionysos?

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

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

Much less glamorous.

Much more useful.

And considerably safer for everyone involved.

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