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

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

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

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

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

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

The Labyrinth is a perfect example.

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

Later, encountering Asterion.

Later still, recognizing Asterion within oneself.

Then working with Ariadne’s thread.

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

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

None of those readings necessarily invalidates the others.

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

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

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

Wait.

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

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

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

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

Then:

Live.

Twenty years later:

Look again.

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

Circles, etc.

The “etc.” matters.

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