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.