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.

I had addition comments – have you defined sacred time and space? I am working on sacred geography as in defining places of myths for Romans etc. I did the New Age. But spatial is as important as temporal for us normies.
LikeLike
Ah, yes. Well done. I wondered if that was where you were headed with those posts. And that actually parallels what I’m setting up with the posts on the swirl and zigzag, which articulate how movement occurs within the Dionysian world, especially a place of fantasy and terror like the Labyrinth. That also gets extended out to time– and not just movement within time, but the ripples that can occur as a consequence. If you’ve read my 13 book poetic magnum opus you’ll understand why this is significant. If not the posts I’m working towards will just seem like an eccentric metaphysics and causality. Hint: when Gods battle the field isn’t just material or spiritual planes of existence. Time itself is a country in which that war may be conducted. Dionysos is able to navigate there as easily as the others because in madness discrete categories blur together and break apart. This is why in the books there are sudden chronological leaps, repetition and divergence in how the same scenes are portrayed, and threats we’ve been building towards poofed away in an instant. After all, the most effective way of defeating an opponent is to ensure that they never survive long enough to become your enemy. One book can also be read forwards or backwards like an old timey flipbook, and the material isn’t just presented in a different order, a couple of the poems are slightly divergent, which only a very close reading would reveal. However, all of this creates a very different emotional reaction in the reader, even if they’re not entirely sure why. I was also going to write one of the volumes as a “choose your own adventure” type thing where you could make choices which determined how and in what order you encountered the story. Unfortunately the software available at the time for creating such books was too complicated to follow and I don’t have the kind of brain that would allow me to map it all out in my head. That was a decade ago, and the grand saga has 3 books left unfinished, so perhaps I’ll go back and try again. Having a “choose your own adventure” volume as part of what amounts to our canon of holy scripture would be a fun way to one up the Christians.
LikeLike
Wouldn’t the swirl and zigzag be sacred geometry? Not exactly Plato, but still.
I don’t do mind maps either. Brains go off on tangents and on their own.
LikeLike