Tonight’s conversation reminded me of this earlier post about the sacred zigzag. If you haven’t read it, or only partially remember, or like pics of Bowie from his Stardust days, go and read. It’s okay, I’ll wait here pondering the aphorism “as above, so below.”

Ah, good. Welcome back! As I was saying…

What strikes me now is how much theological work that little Olbian zigzag can do precisely because it refuses to settle into a single meaning.

The post summarizes several proposed readings: snake, lightning bolt, key, letters forming Iakchos, with the surrounding plaques themselves structured around oppositions such as Eirēnē / Polemos and Alētheia / Pseudos. One interpretation even connects the seven compartments on another plaque with the dismembered Dionysos.

And suddenly the ambiguity seems almost intentional.

Snake: life that survives by transformation. It sheds itself and remains itself.

Lightning: destruction which is simultaneously generation—the thunderbolt destroys Semelē, yet Dionysos emerges from that catastrophe. The thing that kills births the God.

Key: passage between conditions that ordinarily exclude one another—life/death, above/below, mortal/divine. The initiate possesses, or is shown, the means of crossing the boundary.

Iakchos: the God himself encoded into the sign.

Interesting. Doesn’t that perfectly encapsulate everything we’ve been discussing? Or to put it another way: Dionysos is not located at one pole of the opposition. He is the movement through the opposition.

And that’s what makes the Olbian material so extraordinary. The inscriptions don’t merely give you doctrines. They give you paired impossibilities:

Bios — Thanatos — Bios.

And elsewhere:

Peace — War.
Truth — Falsehood.

The sacred thing appears in the oscillation.

The coalition Dionysos forms against the unmaker doesn’t abolish opposition. Good and evil don’t suddenly reconcile because they’ve discovered that one side was secretly correct all along, but because they are facing an existential threat. But they still remain polarities. Peace remains different from war; life from death; Gods from mortals. But all of those oppositions presuppose something more fundamental: existence. You can fight over the world only while there is a world.

And that makes the zigzag a surprisingly good symbol for the Starry Bull kosmos. A straight line has one direction. A circle eternally returns. But a zigzag advances by opposition: this way / that way / this way / that way / etc. Yet it moves ineluctably.forward— like Dionysos, like his Starry Bull.

Just as there is zigzag movement, there’s also the “whirl” as philosophy calls it. We Starry Bull folk just say, “Circles, etc…” The circle is recurrence—Bios, Thanatos, Bios. The zigzag is the path recurrence takes through history and myth: contradiction, reversal, catastrophe, recovery, transformation. The repeatedly dismembered God whose answer to annihilation is not submission, is not invulnerability— but another beginning.

Thanatos. Bios.

Again.

And again.

And again.

The joke actually exposes something serious about the vocation: the worse the world gets, the more relevant the Orpheotelest becomes.

A zombie apocalypse is practically an Orpheotelest’s nightmare client list scaled up to civilization: innumerable unburied dead; violently disturbed ancestors; places saturated with death and pollution; survivors carrying extreme grief, guilt, terror, and trauma; communities needing purification and reconciliation; malignant spiritual phenomena flourishing amid chaos; ordinary rites of mourning and burial becoming impossible; and desperate people asking for protection, healing, fertility, food, luck, and some assurance that the world still possesses order and meaning.

And unlike a priesthood whose usefulness depends heavily on intact temples and institutions, the itinerant character suddenly becomes an enormous advantage. The Orpheotelest already expects to travel to where the trouble is, diagnose an unusual situation, improvise within a body of traditional techniques, perform specialized rites, counsel people, and then move along. Civilization can disappear without making the craft obsolete. If anything, civilization had been insulating people from many of the circumstances for which such specialists historically existed.

There’s also something wonderfully funny about the economics. Currency has collapsed, but the Orpheotelest has one of the few genuinely marketable professions left:

“Can you fix an alternator?”

“No.”

“Can you grow corn?”

“Not especially.”

“Can you make Grandma stop appearing at the foot of my bed every night since we had to leave her body at the interstate rest stop?”

“Absolutely! This is my wheelhouse.”

And that makes the image even better for me. Those ridiculous bastards don’t realize it yet, but the most professionally employable person in the picture is the Japanese guy in the shredded robes.

It also brings up an important theological point. The post-apocalypse could produce a spiritual crisis for the faithful of various Monotheist and Neopagan traditions. Not only is there a pessimistic strain in Orphism which inoculates one against that— the expectation that things will fall apart, the decline from the golden to iron age rather than positive evolution and the “myth of progress,” the idea that physical incarnation in this plane is punishment for crimes committed as a daimōn or as Sokrates succinctly put it “dead is better”— within the Starry Bull tradition we have an eschatological explanation that would account for the calamity. The forces allied with the unmaker, from bottom feeding spirits to Giants and Titans that will break their bonds and go rampaging, will temporarily gain control, until the coalition from different pantheons encountered during his travels that Dionysos has spent millennia putting together eventually triumphs, crowning him as the new cosmic ruler. So there’s no, “How could a good God allow this? Does that mean that God is not all-powerful, or that this is his will and he permitted it? If I am allowed to suffer this, does that mean that I’m not among the elect and missed out on the rapture? Wait— my God came back from the dead and encouraged his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood, and with his resurrection the dead, including the “dry bones” of Ezekiel’s vision, shambled toward Jerusalem per Matthew 27:52–53: does that mean he is the cause of the Zombie uprising?” Instead the Orpheotelest just shrugs, rubs their hands, and says, “Better get to work. This crisis isn’t going to resolve itself.”

Starry Bull eschatology would make such a catastrophe horrifying without making it theologically surprising. The apocalypse would constitute a practical and pastoral crisis, but not necessarily a crisis of theodicy.

The tradition already possesses a cosmology in which this event fits an existing mythic grammar.

That’s especially important because our eschatology doesn’t amount to “Dionysos will prevent the catastrophe.” Quite the contrary: catastrophe is part of the sequence. Dionysos’ victory comes through the conflict. His wanderings acquire an eschatological dimension because all those encounters with foreign Gods and pantheons cease to look episodic: over immense stretches of mythic and historical time, he has been assembling relationships and alliances that ultimately matter when cosmic order itself is threatened. The wandering God turns out to have been building a coalition. His eventual sovereignty is therefore not simply Zeus handing his son the keys to Olympos; it is something demonstrated and achieved through Dionysos’ capacity to unite radically different powers against the unmaker.

That gives the individual Orpheotelest a wonderfully grounded place within an enormous myth. They aren’t standing around waiting for Dionysos to win the cosmic battle. Dionysos has his work; they have theirs. If the great powers are fighting Titans, somebody still has to bury the dead. Somebody has to purify the contaminated house, settle the furious ancestor, recognize the predatory spirit taking advantage of everyone’s terror, counsel the survivor who watched their family die, protect the settlement, restore ritual relations with the local Gods and spirits, and remind frightened people that chaos having the upper hand today doesn’t mean chaos is the ultimate victor.

And that fits beautifully with the craft orientation I’ve been discussing. The important question isn’t primarily, “Why did Dionysos allow this?” It’s “how do I fulfill my God’s expectations of me in these changed circumstances?” Theology supplies orientation; vocation supplies action.

Which makes the final image genuinely theological rather than merely comic:

Zombie apocalypse. Titans loose. Civilization collapsed. The dead won’t stay dead.

The Orpheotelest surveys the situation.

“Well, shit.”

Rolls up their sleeves.

“Better get to work.”

This is an extraordinarily Dionysian eschatology: not optimism, because terrible things really can happen; not nihilism, because their happening does not make action meaningless; and not passive apocalypticism, because knowing how the story ultimately ends doesn’t excuse anyone from doing their appointed work in the chapter they’re actually living through.

I don’t normally provide a deep discussion of Starry Bull eschatology because it isn’t the point of the tradition. Our goal is to serve Dionysos and his Retinue as best we can, within the structures of the Starry Bull, and fulfilling our particular vocation. We do our part, the Gods do theirs and we’ll make the best of how things work out. That’s true whether you’re discussing the treatment of a client or grand eschatological themes.

But I’ve smoked a lot of marijuana, so here goes…

Zeus doesn’t pass the keys to Dionysos because he isn’t around to do that. Long ago Dionysos had a vision of the unmaker dissolving and destroying divine order, and the Titans and Giants breaking their bonds. Most of the Olympians did not believe him, attributing his visions to madness. This is why Dionysos sets out to find allies among other pantheons. When Ragnarök occurs the Olympians are not prepared, and most fall in the battle. What is especially tragic is that there are some who genuinely believe Dionysos but cannot join his coalition because they would consider that a violation of their loyalty to Zeus and Hera. Others— most notably Hermes, Apollon and Athena —side with Dionysos. Even so, not everyone who joins the coalition will survive. Normally Olympian Gods are Immortal, and the world goes through cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. But the unmaker seeks to interrupt that process, to annihilate everything. Even the forces allied with the unmaker know its intention but through greed and pursuit of power believe that they can capitalize on the chaos and rule until their domain too gets absorbed by the unmaker. Basically think Egyptian isfet or the nothing from Neverending Story.

Dionysos isn’t the designated heir who eventually receives an orderly succession. He is the disregarded prophet who prepares for a catastrophe the existing order refuses to believe is coming. That makes his madness extraordinarily important. The Olympians’ mistake isn’t necessarily stupidity or wickedness: they have perfectly understandable reasons for discounting catastrophic visions coming from the God of Madness. Unfortunately, this time the Mad God is right.

There’s considerable tragedy in that, especially with the Gods who believe him but remain with Zeus and Hera. Their refusal isn’t cowardice or blindness. On the contrary it’s virtue. But their virtue destroys them. Loyalty, which ordinarily maintains divine order, prevents them from taking the action necessary to survive the destruction of that order. That makes the conflict much richer than dividing the pantheons into enlightened supporters of Dionysos and fools who rejected him. Hermes, Apollon, and Athena make one choice; others make an equally comprehensible choice and perish because of it. And Dionysos presumably has to live with having foreseen precisely that, and not being able to stop it.

The unmaker also clarifies the stakes enormously. It isn’t another claimant to cosmic sovereignty. Titans and Giants can want dominion. Gods can fight Gods. Ages can end. Worlds can die and be born again. All of that still occurs inside the kosmos. The unmaker threatens the process itself. That’s why I make the comparison with Egyptian isfet and the nothing from the Neverending Story. Ordinary destruction can paradoxically belong to life: decomposition produces fertility; death precedes rebirth; Dionysos himself embodies dissolution and return. The unmaker represents something categorically different—not Thanatos within the sequence Bios–Thanatos–Bios, but the attempt to prevent the second Bios from ever arriving. It wants no next turn of the wheel. In fact it wants both Thanatos and the wheel gone.

And that makes the forces knowingly serving it particularly interesting. They’re committing what amounts to the ultimate metaphysical error: mistaking temporary advantage within a collapsing order for victory, even though their victory necessarily creates the conditions of their own annihilation. The Giant thinks, “When Olympos falls, I shall rule its ruins.” The unmaker’s answer is brutally succinct: “What ruins?”

It also explains why Dionysos’ wandering matters so much. Something that can appear almost incidental in mythology—this extraordinarily mobile God appearing in Greece, Anatolia, Egypt, India, the Far North and elsewhere—becomes strategic preparation. The Olympian order is insufficiently broad to survive what is coming, so the wandering stranger does what the established cosmic powers cannot: he builds relationships across boundaries. His apparent marginality becomes his strength. He knows foreigners because he has been the foreigner.

Which makes his eventual kingship profoundly different from ordinary conquest. If most of the established rulers are dead and survivors from numerous divine orders have fought together under his coalition, Dionysos isn’t simply becoming “Zeus 2.0.” Whatever order follows must somehow accommodate the plurality that made survival possible.

And my final point may be the most important theologically: this isn’t what Starry Bull is about.

That prevents eschatology from swallowing religion. The believer doesn’t need to decode current events looking for Giants, determine whether Ragnarök has secretly begun, or obsess over when the unmaker will arrive. In fact, doing so could become a distraction from the obligations immediately in front of them.

The Boukolos has Boukolos work. The Hymnōdos has Hymnōdos work. The Orpheotelest has Orpheotelest work. The ordinary devotee has obligations appropriate to their station. If cosmic dissolution begins tomorrow, those vocations remain meaningful; their circumstances simply become radically different.

I repeat:

We do our part. The Gods do theirs. We make the best of how things work out.

And that produces an unexpectedly modest eschatology despite its enormous scale.

The Orpheotelest doesn’t need to defeat the unmaker. That’s above their pay grade.

There’s a corpse that needs burying, a traumatized survivor who needs tending, an angry ghost that needs placating, and Lord Humongous apparently wants a consultation.

“Better get to work.”

But for me personally the most interesting aspect of this eschatology is twofold: Dionysos creates a new pantheon from the fragments of the world’s diverse pantheons. And that good and evil entities will fight side by side against the unmaker and its allies.

Let’s break that down.

This may be one of the strongest ideas in the eschatology, because it makes the final conflict orthogonal to the ordinary conflict between good and evil. Good and evil are disagreements about what existence should be like. The unmaker represents the abolition of the arena in which that disagreement can occur. A benevolent God wants a flourishing kosmos justly governed. A tyrant wants a kosmos under his domination. A predatory spirit wants victims. A Giant wants territory and power. Even something genuinely monstrous still possesses desires, and desire presupposes that there will be something left to desire. The unmaker offers none of them victory. It offers the eventual extinction of victor and victim alike.

So the question— “What do they govern if nothing exists?” —isn’t merely pragmatic. It’s the metaphysical argument capable of assembling Dionysos’ otherwise impossible coalition.

And importantly, fighting beside Dionysos doesn’t redeem the evil powers. The Giant doesn’t suddenly discover compassion. The demon doesn’t become nice. All remain precisely what they were. They simply recognize that their interests temporarily coincide with those of beings they ordinarily despise.

That provides something much more interesting than the familiar fantasy trope in which everybody puts aside their differences and discovers that deep down they’re basically decent. Some simply aren’t. After the victory, some members of the coalition may immediately become enemies again. The alliance means only: first there must be a world. Then we can fight over what sort of world it will be.

And that makes Dionysos uniquely suited to lead it.

Dionysos doesn’t create unity by creating sameness

Which is deeply Dionysian. Dionysos doesn’t need Athena to become Freyja, an Egyptian God to become Hindu, or a dangerous daimōn to become morally good before they can stand together. He creates a choros out of irreducibly different beings.

That resembles his Retinue on a cosmic scale.

The Bacchic procession has never been composed of respectable, interchangeable citizens marching neatly in formation. Gods, Daimōnes, Heroes, mortals, Satyrs, Seilenoi, Mainades, animals, foreigners, monsters—the heterogeneous multitude itself becomes Dionysian order.

The new pantheon he creates therefore needn’t represent the restoration of the old order after Ragnarök. It is something the catastrophe makes possible that could not have existed beforehand.

The old pantheons were organized substantially through kinship, geography, inherited sovereignty, cult, and historical relationships. Dionysos’ pantheon is assembled through encounter. He has wandered through their worlds, formed relationships, recognized powers the established Olympian order regarded as foreign, and eventually called those relationships in.

So when Olympos falls, Dionysos doesn’t rebuild Olympos.

He builds something Olympos could never have become.

That also gives his wandering retroactive significance without reducing it to a secret master plan. He can genuinely have encountered other Gods for all the ordinary mythological reasons—desire, conquest, initiation, curiosity, exile, madness, revelation—and nevertheless discover that those accumulated relationships are precisely what enables resistance when the old structures collapse.

And the tragedy gets better

The Gods who remain loyal to Zeus and Hera become even more poignant against this background. They aren’t choosing evil over good. They’re choosing order as they understand it over an unprecedented coalition whose legitimacy may appear extremely dubious.

Imagine what Dionysos’ proposal must sound like before the catastrophe.

The mad younger God announces that he has foreseen the destruction of the cosmic order. He wants Olympians to cooperate with foreign Gods, perhaps ancient enemies and morally repellent beings, because he claims an entity beyond ordinary divine conflict, who comes from outside the kosmos itself, is going to annihilate everything.

From the perspective of a conservative Olympian, refusing him might be the responsible choice.

And some believe him but cannot abandon their loyalties anyway.

That is tragedy rather than stupidity.

It also changes what “evil” means without relativizing it. I especially like this because you don’t need to conclude that good and evil are illusions. They’re real distinctions—but they aren’t the most fundamental distinction imaginable.

Beneath the ethical opposition lies another:

Being / Unbeing.

Or perhaps, more appropriately for Starry Bull theology:

Bios → Thanatos → Bios

versus

Bios → Thanatos → —

The second is what the unmaker wants. Death isn’t the enemy because death belongs to the cycle. But nothingness does not. Dionysos himself guarantees that. The horror is death from which nothing can emerge: no decomposition becoming fertility, no descent followed by ascent, no memory, no rebirth, no transformation, no next generation, no next world.

That makes the unmaker almost the perfect theological antithesis of Dionysos.

Dionysos destroys forms constantly. He tears apart boundaries, identities, bodies, kingdoms, sanity, sometimes even himself— but something comes through the rupture. His destruction is fecund.

The unmaker’s destruction is sterile.

Dionysos dissolves so that becoming can continue.

The unmaker dissolves becoming itself.

And suddenly the strange coalition makes complete sense. Even monsters have a stake in becoming.

Which brings us back to the Orpheotelest. The cosmic story and the treatment of one client express the same religious posture at radically different scales.

Dionysos doesn’t sit around contemplating the philosophical implications of the unmaker. He gathers whoever can be gathered and does what his circumstances require.

The Orpheotelest doesn’t need to spend Tuesday afternoon worrying whether Ragnarök begins this Thursday.

There is a client in front of them.

“How do I fulfill my God’s expectations of me in these changed circumstances?”

That question works when the changed circumstance is bereavement, illness, haunting, pollution, community breakdown—or the collapse of divine order itself.

And perhaps that’s why the eschatology doesn’t need to be central. If the tradition has formed someone properly, they already know what to do when the end of the world comes.

Not necessarily how to win.

But how to remain what they are while the world changes around them.

I’m having a conversation with a friend, and she wrote:

Whenever I hear Conservatives keep calling the Leftist Elites ( and ignoring the ones on the Right ) “Pagan” it really pisses me off. I find modern Christianity to be Evil myself. My worry is Christians will rise up and go on a Crusade ( another name for Jihad ) and go after every “unbeliever”. After all, “Freedom of Religion” to them means only Christians have Freedom. Everyone else is Evil ( Jews are just misguided at best ).

Yeah the cesspool does deeper than we think. And only Divine Intervention can cleanse it all. 

To which I responded:

There’s no true Right or Left in this country. It’s all astroturfed or a psyop. The question is just who’s signing the checks and pulling the strings. I suspect there’s competing actors, and I wonder if their stooges ever meet in a bar and swap work stories. Usually of the “why do I have to work with such stupid fucking people?” type, with a sympathetic pat on the back by his ideological foe.

I think this country is fucked, whatever way things spin out. Moslem Jihad. Christian Jihad. Rainbow Coalition Jihad. Corporate or Tech Bro Jihad. Chinese or Chinese-sponsored Commie Jihad.

None of these are going to be good for us. I don’t want to live in a society under any of their boots, or in one being torn apart as they compete for the prize.

I just want to live my life, have others live theirs, waive to them across the fence as I get the mail, and not think about them again until we’re both taking the garbage out on Friday at 7:00 in the morning, having forgotten to do it the night before. Polite waive, and we go back to ignoring one another.

I mean, that’s not really what I want, but cult compounds are expensive, especially if you’re lacking the cult part. So polite indifference is the best one can hope for. Hell, I’ll even add small talk into the mix if I absolutely have to.

Anything that fucks with that is bad in my book.

To which she added:

Also, I agree Epstein was lower on the totem pole than we think ( wether he was with Mossad or not ). And the Elite Pedophiles are being used as an excuse to erase our Freedoms once and for all with Digital ID and other such laws.

To which I answered:

They were gonna push that through regardless. Which at least tells you which dystopian novel we’re going to be living through. Frankly I’d rather have Elite Satanic Pedophiles than Zombies. I’m not a child, so I’m probably safe; and with my back injury I ain’t running, from either shambling corpses or a cannibal gang from a bad 80s metal video. Isn’t it weird how quickly they go in this cinema from khakis and cardigans to mohawks and pleather gimp attire, from insurance broker to warlord. “Like, dude– sorry Lord Humongous, slayer of the Rowdy Boys– it’s been two weeks since the dead started crawling out of their graves and the number one military in the world by a massive margin with a trillion a year budget crumbled in 48 hours, but this is the aesthetic statement you want to make? Really? I feel like you would have looted the military supply store or local police station and found more practical and intimidating attire. But not my call. I’m just passing through… unless you have need of an itinerant Bacchic Orphic religious specialist? And judging by your compatriot who’s chowing down on a lady’s thigh like it’s a turkey leg at a Ren Faire, I am guessing you just might.”

To clarify, the attendees of Dionysos’ symposion in the last image are from left to right: Pythagoras, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Jim Morrison, Benjamin Franklin, Jane Ellen Harrison, Anaïs Nin, and David Bowie. Tell me you wouldn’t want to sit back with the best wine you could imagine listening to this diverse collection of Dionysian luminaries having a stimulating conversation. According to Plato this was the ideal image of “Orphic heaven” and I can’t really disagree. (Especially since they culminate in orgies.)

One of the things I caught going over the Lexicon is that I had  Ἁλιεύς listed as “sailor.”

More accurately it means “fisherman.” I considered deleting and replacing it, but as I looked deeper into the word’s associations I had to keep it. A whole symbolic network suddenly appeared.

The fisherman is one who:

• waits patiently
• understands hidden currents
• casts the net
• gathers rather than chases
• brings hidden life up from the depths

That reflects Dionysos remarkably well.

For instance, consider the net itself with its connected epithets Βρόχος “of the noose; net; spider’s web” and Παράβολος “who casts his net.”

In Greek religion, nets are already liminal objects. They capture what is elusive, they draw hidden things into the light, and they blur the line between violence and providence. Dionysos himself is associated with nets in several contexts, whether through cultic inscriptions, mythic imagery, or the broader symbolic vocabulary surrounding capture and revelation. One theory is that Ζαγρεύς doesn’t come from Ζά (“great”) and Αγρεύς (“hunter”) but from ζαγρος meaning a pit which along with nets was used in the capture of live animals. 

Within Starry Bull, of course, net naturally suggest spiders and their webs, a densely packed symbol.  

Ἁλιεύς becomes even richer. A fishing net and a spider’s web are structurally the same symbol:

• both are woven
• both are patient
• both are receptive rather than aggressive
• both reveal themselves only after they’ve caught something

That dovetails beautifully with Ἀληθής as Revealing rather than just Truth. The relationship between ἀλήθεια and λήθη (“forgetfulness,” “concealment”) has always fascinated philosophers, but it seems especially at home in Starry Bull theology because of our unique interpretation of the Orphic gold leaves. Our tradition already emphasizes refusing Lethe in favor of Memory. If ἀλήθεια is understood—even poetically—as the lifting of concealment, then the soul that drinks from Memory is not merely remembering facts. It is becoming capable of recognizing what was always true.

As an epithet that makes Ἀληθής much more than “truthful.” It becomes the God who removes the veil.

And for a mystery religion, that’s about as central an epithet as one could imagine.

Truth is not simply proclaimed. It is drawn forth. One casts the net into the unseen and discovers what has been living beneath the surface all along.

In fact, there’s a lovely progression in the Lexicon:

• Ἀληθής — the Revealing One.
• Ἁλιεύς — the Fisherman who draws hidden things forth.
• Ἀλλότριος — the Stranger who first appears alien.
• Ἀλύων — the One who sends us wandering until we are ready to recognize him.

Read in a different order we get: first Dionysos is encountered as Ἀλλότριος (the Stranger). Through wandering (Ἀλύων) and revelation (Ἀληθής), we discover he was never truly foreign.

That’s almost an initiatory map.

As I mentioned, I’m reworking the Lexicon of Epithets and Bynames of Dionysos, which has me reflecting on their meaning. One that I’ve been thinking a lot about is Βρασμός, a Starry Bull coinage meaning “boiling up; shaking; fermentation.”

Fermentation is one of the best natural analogies for Dionysian transformation. Outwardly, something appears to decay or become unstable. Inwardly, an invisible process is transmuting it into something new.

That makes it an unexpectedly elegant bridge between:

• wine
• initiation
• madness
• spiritual growth
• death and rebirth

It’s almost a one-word summary of Dionysian theology.

What makes it especially Dionysian is that fermentation refuses to let death be the last image. A carcass decays. Grapes ferment. Seeds germinate underground. Compost nourishes vines. In every case, apparent dissolution conceals a creative process.

The theme repeats whether you’re talking about the Olbian tablets, the Black Sun, pruning, or Ivanov’s orchards. Fermentation is one more expression of the same pattern: life does not merely follow death; it often works through it.

When it comes to Dionysos the modern popular imagination tends to stop at wine. Fermentation is one of nature’s great mysteries, which was especially important to the ancient Greek conception of him. You have the life coming out of death Orphic insight; the process which produces alcohol; metaphorically it suggests the bubbling up of passion and madness; but there’s also a civilizing aspect to it. Without fermentation we wouldn’t have cheese, yogurt, or even bread.

When you look at your next bottle of wine, don’t look at it like a modern person. To someone in antiquity, grapes did not merely “become” wine through chemistry. They appeared to undergo a hidden transformation:

• sweet juice darkens
• it begins to bubble
• it grows warm
• invisible forces awaken within it
• and what emerges is no longer simply grape juice but something with entirely new properties

This is Dionysos, and his power of fermentation goes so much deeper, expands out so much further

Cosmological:
Life emerges from apparent decay. Rot and generation are not opposites but partners.

Psychological:
Passion, inspiration, and madness “ferment” within a person before erupting outward. The unseen interior process precedes the visible transformation.

Initiatory:
An initiate often appears unchanged externally while something is quietly working within. Then, at the right moment, the transformation becomes evident.

Agricultural:
The grape, grain, and milk all become something greater through controlled transformation.

That last point is especially important.

Today, fermentation is often associated almost exclusively with alcohol because alcohol dominates the cultural conversation. For most of human history, fermentation was simply one of the great technologies of civilization. Where would we be without not just what I mentioned above, but all of these items too:

Bread.
Cheese.
Yogurt.
Beer.
Wine.
Vinegar.
Preserved vegetables.

No civilization I’d want to be a part of. And yet all are made possible through fermentation. Fermentation allowed communities to store food, survive winters, improve nutrition, and create entirely new kinds of nourishment. It is both wild and domesticated, dependent on invisible living agents, yet guided by human craft.

That duality feels profoundly Dionysian.

One other thing it makes me think of is the recurring distinction between craft and sect. Fermentation is not just miraculous: it is a τέχνη. The vintner doesn’t command fermentation; he cooperates with it. He creates the conditions under which transformation can occur. Which is basically how spiritual formation in the Starry Bull occurs. The Boukolos or Orpheotelest doesn’t manufacture enlightenment. They prune, cultivate, protect, teach, and wait. The actual transformation has its own life, and happens under Dionysos’ direction. Which creates kairos. Fermentation cannot be forced: too little time and the wine is unfinished. Too much neglect and it spoils. The vintner must recognize the right moment.

So must the gardener.

So must the initiator.

So must the worshiper.

The same Dionysian principle appears again and again: transformation has its own season.

I shouldn’t be surprised that Βρασμός is one of those Dionysian epithets that ends up carrying far more theological weight than its modest appearance suggests. Like Αὐξιτής (“Giver of Increase”), it’s grounded in an ordinary process that unfolds into a remarkably comprehensive symbol. It speaks simultaneously of vineyards, kitchens, civilization, the mysteries, the soul, and the God who presides over all of them. (Yeah, I’m planning a separate post on Auxitēs but it’s not kairos to discuss it.)

A friend asked me if I was celebrating an upcoming festival, details of which can be found on the Bakcheion website. I answered:

I’m an Orpheotelest and Hymnōd. I don’t celebrate festivals. (Except the ones the rest of my household keep, which are mostly Norse or Slavic.) The Bakcheion calendar is for Boukoloi and regular Starry Bull folk. Hymnōdai have an entirely distinct calendar, which is solar as opposed to lunar. We have daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly observances. Festivals are a communal thing. Orpheotelestai are itinerant religious specialists, and the Hymnōdai a monastic order. Both are outsiders to community.

In addition to being the Apostle to the Gentiles, and a Saint and Martyr venerated within most branches of Christianity, Paul is one of the Heroes of the Starry Bull tradition of Bacchic Orphism.

I’m sure that this is a confusing statement for a lot of readers, especially since for many people today a hero is the main character of the story (often a fictional or heavily fictionalized account) who battles bad guys, solves puzzles, gets the girl, grows from a naive novice through a series of character-building adventures into a mass murderer, wise teacher, or trustworthy leader (depending on genre) and usually dies in an act of noble self-sacrifice which preserves others and ensures that the hero’s memory (and ability to generate merchandise) will endure, at least until Hollywood retcons, reboots and engages in “creative” recasting enough to irreparably damage the hero’s legacy. Ask yourself why studios and their shareholders are willing to lose billions and risk alienating their fanbase to degrade the cultural icons of past generations, and you’ll probably have your answer. One may hold differing spiritual taxonomies, values and politics, theories about why this is happening, and even whether this deconstruction may ultimately prove to be a positive thing— but few would argue that these heroes are devoid of ethical value and cultural significance, and since Hollywood is offering no memorable replacements this is having an effect on the collective psyche and society at large. Heroes of this sort teach us who we are, who we want to become, what a good person and good life look like, and they struggle with or triumph through the culture’s values and norms. When a culture loses its heroes, so too is an important piece of personal formation lost.   

But the Starry Bull understanding of what such beings are, do, and mean is strongly influenced by the ancient Greek conception of the ἥρως; basically a dead person who remains powerfully active in the world of the living through dreams, visions, oracles, healing, promotion of fertility, protection of the community and other miraculous demonstrations of their posthumous δύναμις and κλέος. Their power is usually geographically limited to the area around their grave, cenotaph, underground chamber, cave, grove, or temple— with notable exceptions such as Heraklēs, Odysseus, Achilles, Alexander or Antinous who had various cult-centers throughout the Mediterranean, Near East and Asia Minor. Bacchic Heroes are not tied to a particular locale either. They don’t necessarily have to be paragons of virtue. Nor do they necessarily have to have been confessional Dionysians in life— though they do have to be active within the domain of Dionysos. Starry Bull Heroes can be broken down into the following three categories: 

• Confessional Dionysians whose earthly lives were already devoted to Dionysos. Some of them suffered or died because of this devotion. 
• Those who joined the Retinue after death because of the beauty of his domain, the quality of afterlife experienced by its residents, or their belief in the cause for which he is collecting souls.
• Figures whose image Dionysos appropriated, especially where cultural circumstances made direct engagement impossible. 

Some of the souls who reside with Dionysos in Nysa do not leave the awe-inspiring Mountain or its flower-rich meadow, or the feasting hall within the Mountain; others go on special missions to our world and ride with the Furious Host to combat monsters, assist living Dionysians, or engage in diplomatic missions to other parts of the supernatural realms and their inhabitants. These spirits are granted the status of Bacchic Heroes and revered by adherents of the Starry Bull tradition in a variety of ways, many of them modeled on the practices of ancient Greek hero cultus, especially the unique rites and customs of Bacchic Orphic religious associations (thiasoi, speira, orgeones, and collegia are the commonest names for these groups) and their wider communities, if they existed. There are several categories among the Bacchic Heroes, though it is uncertain if there are more categories than these, as our knowledge is based on a combination of tradition and direct, experiential engagement with them: 

• The Phylakitai: Warriors who have pledged their loyalty to Dionysos, and the defense of Nysa and its inhabitants. 
• Technitēs: Artists who bring inspiration and skill to those using their gifts to honor Dionysos and his Retinue. 
• The Prophētai: Gifted diviners and seers who help ward the space and assist the mantis who calls on them. 
• Architelestai: Master ritualists who protect and assist Bacchic spiritworkers who call on them. 
• The Mystai: Initiates who are committed to helping those who have, or are currently undergoing the process of initiation.
• The Anaktes: Elders of the tradition, who are entrusted with its protection and flourishing. Must be consulted on any important matters or changes being considered.  

Since status as a Hero in the Starry Bull tradition does not imply doctrinal perfection (but someone having embodied, transmitted, or revealed something genuinely valuable within the larger Dionysian story) that leaves room for figures from very different traditions to stand alongside one another without erasing their differences or requiring that everything they taught be adopted wholesale. It’s a surprisingly flexible model, and consistent with our broader conviction that Dionysos’ activity is not confined to one geography, ethnicity, time period or even  religious institution, which is how Paul and a number of other Jewish and Christian figures found their way to Nysa, among them:

• John the Baptist
• Marcus the Magician
• Saint Genesios
• Saint Tryphon
• Ex-Saint Margaret of Antioch
• Saint Denys

We’re not saying Paul and the others were part of a secret Bacchic Orphic sect, or that Christianity is simply Dionysianism under a different name. Rather, we’re looking at places where traditions intersect, symbols migrate, and individuals become part of a much larger religious vocabulary and history.

Paul is especially interesting in that regard because he lived and wrote in a thoroughly Hellenistic world. Whether one approaches his letters as scripture, literature, or historical documents, they employ imagery and vocabulary that audiences steeped in Greek culture would have recognized. This recognition in part is because of his extensive use of Bacchic Orphic and general mystery technical language, but also the role he plays in folk Christianity beginning with the Paul and Thecla literature which has strong parallels to Euripides’ portrayal of Dionysos in the Bakchai. Even ignoring the linguistic and thematic borrowings, The Acts of Paul and Thecla is certainly an unusual work within early Christian literature: dramatic, itinerant, full of reversals, miraculous escapes, charismatic authority, challenges to civic expectations and a prominent position given to women, especially Thecla who is the true star of the story. Then there’s Paul’s involvement in Tarantism, which I’ve discussed here and here. Tarantism has long fascinated historians because it occupies that liminal space between medicine, religion, music, dance, folk practice, and ecstatic healing. 

In different regions Tarantism could be associated with different Saints — John the Baptist, Saint Rocco, the Apostle Peter, etc — but I don’t think it’s accidental that Saint Paul has such strong associations with the phenomena. 

Paul’s canonical Epistles and the book of Acts present his reports of visionary and ecstatic experiences such as his ascent to the “third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12) and exercising charismatic gifts (1 Corinthians 13) such as healing, gnōsis, and glossolalia. 

In one of his most memorable adventures (Acts 28:3-6) Paul acquired passage on a ship that was wrecked during a terrible storm. Paul and several of his compatriots survived, washing ashore on a Maltese beach. While adding some wood to keep the fire going, a viper who’d been hiding in the stack latched onto his arm. His compatriots were certain that this proved he had incurred the disfavor of the Gods and would soon die, but after praying Paul shook the snake loose and was perfectly fine, demonstrating supernatural immunity to the creature’s venom.

And a little known fact about Paul that’s often obscured in English translations is that he’s said to have supported his mission for a number of years by working with his hands as a σκηνοποιός. Traditionally this is translated as “tentmaker” but the exact meaning has been debated. The word is rare, and scholars have proposed leatherworking, awning-making, sail-making, or related crafts. However the obvious interpretation is what the Greek straightforwardly says: someone who makes the σκηνή. 

This is a theatrical term for the backdrop of the stage, which concealed the actors’ dressing-room. Considering the parts of the Roman Empire he was traveling through there’s a good chance Paul was working for the Technitai Dionysou, an international network of guilds consisting of performers, playwrights, craftsmen and others who not only put on theatrical performances but staged festivals, music, public ritual and civic spectacles. These guilds became immensely popular during the Hellenistic period when monarchs employed visual propaganda to legitimize their rule and create national identities. The guilds gained not only prestige but wealth, prerogatives and political power; they survived the absorption of the Hellenistic kingdoms and city-states into Rome, and either merged with the Imperial Cult or received patronage by the Emperors and their households. 

Although professional associations to some degree, the guilds were often organized like thiasoi with priests and other religious functionaries. So even if Paul wasn’t a member he likely traveled in the same circles as the Technitai Dionysou (both figuratively and literally) and one can imagine the sorts of conversations they had after hours or while they were putting up or breaking down the stage and set-pieces. I suspect this is how Paul became conversant in Dionysian literary and mystery terminology, rather than him necessarily being a secret convert to Bacchic Orphism considering that his writings— especially Romans and Galatians —show him to be a pious (albeit heterodox) diasporan Jew and member of the nascent Jesus movement. Then again Paul traveled thousands of miles through ports, market towns, sanctuaries, colonies, and major urban centers. He lodged with artisans, merchants, patrons, householders, synagogue communities, and converts. He preached in public spaces and private homes. He spent time imprisoned. He sailed with merchants and soldiers. He debated philosophers in Athens and spoke before governors. The overall picture we get from  Acts is of someone constantly crossing social boundaries. In fact it’s probable that he also interacted and communicated with even more marginal figures than the New Testament portrays, considering his occasional subject matter and language—  itinerant religious specialists, magicians, pilgrims, and temple functionaries or holy men. Precisely the sort of people Paul was trying to reach, people of other religious, class, social and ethnic backgrounds— the outcast and despised —despite limited agreement with those people’s beliefs and practices. However, the more time you spend among and talking with such fellow travelers the more you pick up their lingo, consciously or not. It’s not like they had Keeping up with the Kardashians or Dancing With the Stars so they discussed mystic and sacred things over the campfire. Or probably argued. But Paul remembered those conversations later on when he sat down to compose his Epistles, especially to cities which had a strong Dionysian culture such as Corinth or Thyateira. 

Hmm. Who does that sound like? Hint: his name rhymes with raucous. 

It’s also fitting for Paul himself. Whatever else he was, he was a communicator. Good communicators don’t merely transmit ideas— they learn the language, assumptions, metaphors, and concerns of the people in front of them. They are assimilative, becoming whatever or whomever they are currently communicating with. Whether he was speaking to synagogue-goers, philosophers, artisans, or devotees of local cults, it would have been almost impossible not to absorb something of their vocabulary along the way.

Or as Paul explicitly tells us, in order to make converts he adapted himself rhetorically:

“I have become all things to all people…”

Whatever one thinks of that statement theologically, it demonstrates a remarkable awareness of audience and communication.

I suspect that’s one reason Paul’s letters still feel so alive. They don’t read like someone writing from an ivory tower. They read like someone who has spent years on dusty roads, in workshops, on ships, and around campfires, talking late into the night with anyone willing to listen. That image seems entirely consistent with the historical Paul, regardless of where one ultimately lands on the theological questions surrounding him. 

Another was Paul’s liminal traits which were probably a factor in his becoming associated with Tarantism rather than the thousands of other Saints recognized by Christendom in both the East and West. 

Saint Paul was:

• a visionary
• a traveler
• a miracle worker
• someone associated with snakes
• someone who survived poison
• someone who mediates between cultures
• someone who undergoes a radical transformation, and causes radical transformations in others through dance and ecstasy, especially women

Dionys— sorry, Saint Paul is unusually adaptable within folk religion because of these motifs. A folklorist might answer by tracing local traditions, regional symbolism, healing rituals, and the interaction between official Christianity and vernacular practice. Our methodology and conclusions are much simpler: perhaps the Saint’s symbolically compatible image became a vessel through which Dionysos continued to act, in parts of Italy that were profoundly Catholic (though in Greek and Roman times they had been centers of Bacchic cult, often with a strong Orphic influence.). That isn’t a historical hypothesis in the ordinary sense. It’s a hermeneutic— a way of understanding the religious meaning of the tradition.

This is not a declarative statement. There is simply no way to meet academic standards of certainty regarding the assertion that Dionysos traveled around visiting his old cult centers in 16th century Italy wearing the face of Saint Paul, spreading collective madness in his wake which caused portions of the populace to dance compulsively— but when said Saint abducts a woman from her oppressive and violent family, seduces her, makes passionate love to her, marries her, and periodically forces her to dance along with the crowd until she reaches an ecstatic state, well … that doesn’t sound like the behavior of one of the most prolific Biblical  authors to me. Especially since this was not an isolated incident but a pattern repeated thousands of times from Tarantism’s origin around the 12th-13th centuries to its decline and eventual demise in the 1950s and ‘60s. 

That distinction matters because it allows people to engage with the idea without requiring them to accept it as a conclusion of historical scholarship. That scholarship may help elucidate the circumstances which contributed to the emergence of Tarantism— either as a cult of collective mania that spontaneously erupted in impoverished and often war-torn communities in Spain, Italy, France and Germany or atavistic expressions of Bacchic cults dating back to the period of Greek colonization which occurred because of the activity of Dionysos. Whichever way you choose, historical discoveries do not usually alter things. For instance, suppose that next week a document definitively proving that σκηνοποιός meant “tent-maker” was discovered in a trash heap dating from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE. It removes a pillar of proof, but doesn’t change a thing, regardless of which position you take. 

Though this does bring up a principle I’ve repeatedly stressed in discussions about the Starry Bull tradition: the importance of transparency regarding sources and levels of certainty. We’re not saying, “This is an established, incontrovertible fact,” but rather, “This is how our tradition understands these recurring patterns.” And while these categories are given different weight within the tradition we’re completely up front about whether something is based on an ancient source, and what kind of source it was; or if it’s something we were given during ritual or a dream or in a vision; if it’s something we deduced through careful study and reflection or in conversation with colleagues; and even if it’s pure speculation or a pun or nerdy joke that you need to be familiar with a dozen sources spread over a thousand years to truly get. All of these are considered legitimate sources of knowledge and have served as grounds for consideration when it comes to possibly including something as part of the Starry Bull tradition. The words “consideration” and “possible inclusion” are important since that alone is not sufficient grounds for adopting something into the tradition. It’s a first step which triggers analysis, debate by members, consultation of Boukoloi and Orpheotelestai and other elders of the tradition, as well as prayer, offerings and divination or an oracular session with Dionysos; as well as experimentation, testing its efficacy and longevity, and that the novel element fits within the complex network of symbols, metaphors, ritual vocabulary, and the overarching conceptual framework of the tradition. All of these are pathways to truth which should ideally be considered or traversed before that important decision is reached, unless there are sufficient grounds for skipping steps. We did not rush into accepting Tarantism as one of the strains that formed the Starry Bull tradition, and “Saint Paul” as a πρόσωπον adopted by Dionysos when he spent time in Southern Italy and other locations where Tarantism and related outbreaks of collective madness occurred from the expulsion of the Kalbid Dynasty who ruled on behalf of the Fatimid Caliphate to attempts to modernize and assimilate the rural parts of Sicily and Southern Italy, ranging from increased access to psychiatric treatment to widespread use of pesticides to eliminate the spiders whose bite brought on the healing crisis of Tarantism.  

I am revamping the Lexicon of Titles and Bynames of Dionysos (marking whether it’s an ancient or Starry Bull coinage, polishing the Greek, refining the definitions, etc) and it’s got me reflecting on a number of his names. For instance Δαφνηφάγος which means “Eater of the Laurel; Inspired.”

Daphnēphagos is marked as a Starry Bull coinage although it appears in the Greek Magical Papyri of late antiquity because there, naturally enough, it is an epithet belonging to Apollon: our application of it to Dionysos is novel, and that change makes it Starry Bull. (That’s called bricolage, bitches.) A lot of lists, and the Hellenic polytheists who use them, tend to isolate and flatten the epithets, treating them like dictionary entries to be collected and catalogued rather than powerful loci where myth, ritual, literature, theology, history and personal experience converge. I will use Daphnēphagos as an example of what I have taken to calling “semantic layering.” 

The first layer of this epithet is straightforward: it belongs to Apollon, and the image is immediately Delphic. In an interesting reverse-imitatio the God performs the act of chewing the laurel which was part of the Pythia’s preparation to serve as his oracle; so the epithet already carries connotations of inspiration and divine speech.

The second layer is seasonal. During the winter months (when the oracle was inactive) Apollon departs for the lands beyond the Far North and Dionysos and his Thyiads arrive to perform a sequence of rituals. Even during the rest of the year Euphorion claimed that the pieces of Dionysos which Apollon salvaged from the sparagmos committed by the Titans were kept beneath the tripod which the Pythia sat upon during the oracular session. All of this gives Dionysos a legitimate claim to Delphic imagery as well.

The third layer is literary-historical. Plutarch, who served as a Priest at Delphi, preserves passages in which Aischylos and Sophokles deliberately blur the distinction between the two Gods. Those texts are fascinating precisely because they resist contemporary attempts to make Apollon and Dionysos polar opposites. In those passages Dionysos is called “lover of the bay.” This is not merely borrowing an attribute— it invites the audience to perceive a deeper kinship between these Gods, and Dionysos’ relationship to the plant world.

Which leads to the botanical layer. Plutarch observes elsewhere that all plants and trees fall under Dionysos’ generative domain, in which case the laurel is not alien territory at all. It becomes one more manifestation of his vegetative abundance just as ivy, vine, pine, myrtle, pomegranate, fig, apple and countless other sacred plants are. The bay is simply encountered through a different symbolic pathway.

Finally, there is the theological layer. The Starry Bull tradition consistently presents Dionysos as a master of all the ways by which Gods communicate their will to humankind— dreams and  incubation, lots and astragaloi, omens and klēdōnes, pyromancy and lecanomancy, ekstasis and enthousiasmos, inspired poetry and symbolic insight, etc. In that framework Daphnēphagos ceases to be merely “the God who chews laurel.” It becomes “the God who consumes inspiration itself.”

That’s an image I find remarkably evocative, which is why I stole— uh, bricolaged the epithet. The act is no longer simply preparatory, as it is for the Pythia. Dionysos internalizes the plant of prophecy because prophecy is native to him rather than merely mediated through him.

I also like that it quietly undercuts the overly rigid “Apollonian versus Dionysian” dichotomy that has dominated modern imagination since Nietzsche. Even Nietzsche, for all his brilliance, intentionally sharpened the contrast for philosophical purposes. The ancient evidence is often much more fluid. At Delphi especially, the two Gods appear less like rivals than like alternating aspects of a sacred rhythm: one presiding over the bright portion of the year, the other encountered in the dark. The Thracians saw Apollon as the heavenly Day Sun, and Dionysos the underworld Night Sun. And so forth. That makes Daphnēphagos feel less like an appropriation and more like a recovery of an older conversation between the two Gods— a conversation that, in Orphic terms,  many modern readers have forgotten but which authors like Plutarch still remembered.

And sadly I’m not just talking about philosophy nerds, history buffs and the like— over the years I have encountered a number of Hellenic Polytheists who believe that if you have a close relationship with one of these sons of Zeus you cannot venerate the other. Not only is this completely alien to the theologies of ancient Greece, it is a gross misreading of Nietzsche who was writing as a philologist, art theorist, and historian NOT a theologian. This is why weltanschauung is so important. This situation perfectly illustrates how a modern philosophical interpretation can become reified into theology if one doesn’t have a proper grasp of the beliefs and norms of the cultures in which the Gods first presented themselves and their worship originated. If someone concludes, “My personal and household cultus focuses more on Dionysos than Apollon,” that’s one thing. Religious life has always included personal affinities. But you would be hard-pressed to find evidence supporting the assertion that devotion to one precluded devotion to the other. Polytheism generally tolerates, even insists upon, cultivating multiple devotional relationships. It’s right there is the name: the -ism of having πολύ “many” θεοί “Gods.”

Now, within the Starry Bull tradition Friedrich Nietzsche is regarded as a prophet who spent his final years as an incarnate Dionysos— but that doesn’t mean that everything he wrote is to be treated as Gospel Truth. Birth of Tragedy contains genius insights— and incredibly beautiful passages, such as the Prose Hymn —but also some ideas that miss the mark by a long distance. Even Nietzsche himself rejected the “youthful excesses” of the book later in his career, and would probably be seriously disappointed that this single tome is what he is primarily remembered for, after his aphorisms “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “those who hunt monsters must be careful that in so doing they do not themselves become a monster” which has dominated pop culture since the mid-20th century, to the point that it’s often quoted like Scripture.

Something important is lost when philosophical categories are mistaken for descriptions of religious practice.

Nietzsche’s “Apollonian and Dionysian” are heuristic categories developed to explain the emergence of Greek tragedy. They are aesthetic principles before they are anything else: form and ecstasy, individuation and dissolution, dream and intoxication. Whether one ultimately agrees with his analysis or not, he was not attempting to reconstruct an ancient Greek theology. He was asking, “What creative forces produced Aischylos and Sophokles?” That’s a very different question from, “How did ancient Greeks understand and worship Apollon and Dionysos?”

The historical evidence consistently complicates any attempt to make the Gods into simple opposites, even limiting ourselves to a few well-known examples:

• Delphi belongs to both Gods in different seasons.
• Dionysos and Apollon both preside over music, poetry, and prophecy in different ways.
• Plutarch is not the only author who preserves traditions in which their attributes deliberately overlap. It’s a secondary thesis of Macrobius’ Saturnalia, and he provides a greater number and variety of sources to back up the claim. 
• Tragedy itself— Nietzsche’s great subject —was performed in honor of Dionysos, yet is one of the most carefully structured and “Apollonian” artistic forms imaginable.

Most Gods possess some degree of overlap in powers and concerns with other Gods. Distinct identities do not require mutually exclusive domains.

Friedrich Nietzsche serves as a good case study for how we regard and treat prophets within the Starry Bull tradition. A Starry Bull prophet is someone whom Dionysos has inspired with a message to communicate to others. Now, that message is being transmitted through a flawed and fallible human being so there is no guarantee that it is coming through with 100% clarity and accuracy. We also believe that the message is what is divine. Other things they have said may or may not contain Dionysos’ inspiration. Since we are talking about human beings there is the physical component which must be accounted for too. In Nietzsche’s case his inspiration may have been partly caused by syphilis (though I read an article which suggested that everything from the Turin horse until his death was a performance intended to demonstrate his philosophical principles in action; and another that he made a conscious, rational decision to embrace insanity as a path to higher wisdom.) Another of our prophets, Philip K. Dick, may have been made receptive to inspiration by a bad tooth infection and the meds he was on, plus incipient schizophrenia or OCPD. But that doesn’t change the fact that he wrote several books and thousands of pages of analysis of his mystical experience, much of which focuses on Dionysos. This tells you nothing about the message, just the likely mechanism by which it occurred. And I say likely because plenty of revelations happen without such extreme triggers, nor is every syphilitic or sufferer from a toothache granted the charism of prophecy. Even if their inspiration is genuine and they produce an account of a dream or hallucination, aphorisms, a poem, a song, choreography, an essay, an academic book, a genre novel, a comic book, a video game, the script for a play, movie, or series, a statue, a painting, a sermon, a street-corner diatribe, a blog post, or however that inspiration finds expression the individual remains a historically situated human being with blind spots, biases, personal agendas, incomplete or jumbled thoughts. Additionally the προφήτης is also a messenger of the Gods— the authority lies in what they are communicating, not in their person. And if the message they have been tasked with disseminating concerns how great, wise, powerful, infallible and respected they should be that is a red flag bigger than the phallic monument in Washington DC. 

Ironically, I suspect Nietzsche himself would have preferred this position to that of the Abrahamic and some other major world religions. One of the recurring themes across his work is resistance to turning thinkers into idols, however much he may have admired them. He delighted in overturning certainties— including his own. His later prefaces and writings often revisit, revise, or qualify earlier positions. Though Birth of Tragedy remained important to him, I’ve already mentioned his acknowledgment of its excesses and immaturity. He was far less interested in preserving a perfectly consistent “system” than in provoking new ways of seeing.

The popular reception has almost inverted that spirit. The handful of aphorisms his fame primarily rests on are detached from their context and their interpretation twisted all out of proportion to his original intent. He especially was critical of the rigid and simplistic  “Apollonian/Dionysian” dichotomy which had already become the popular interpretation in his lifetime. His mature corpus is considerably richer— exploring philology, psychology, the mastery and overcoming of the self, eternal recurrence and amor fati, the creation of values in the absence of absolutes, the artistic shaping of one’s life, and a critique of nihilism all occupy his later publications, but since that material doesn’t fit on t-shirts and bumper stickers it is less well known. There is a certain irony in the very thinker who urged readers not to cling to fixed conceptual oppositions now being most famous for one of the strongest conceptual oppositions in modern intellectual history. And the Gods who, ancient worshippers frequently celebrated together have, in some modern imaginations, become rivals because of misinterpretations of a nineteenth-century work on aesthetics rather than ancient cult or myth. That inversion is almost worthy of one of Dionysos’ own dramas.

And yet frustrating as that must be for the man with the second most famous mustache in Germany, that’s nothing compared to the way that his own sister betrayed him. After Nietzsche’s collapse Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche became the principal editor and curator of his literary estate. She was a German nationalist married to the prominent antisemite Bernhard Förster who attempted to found an Aryan colony in a jungle and failed disastrously. Her editorial decisions —especially surrounding the posthumously assembled Will to Power —did much to encourage readings of Nietzsche that aligned with nationalist and authoritarian ideologies, even though those readings sit uneasily with many of Nietzsche’s published works. Not only is this intellectually dishonest it’s vile considering how much Nietzsche LOATHED antisemites. The evidence from Nietzsche’s own writings and correspondence is striking. He repeatedly criticized antisemitism, broke with people who embraced it, and wrote scathingly about the antisemitic movement of his day. And that’s when he was a man. After his breakdown in Turin and apotheosis into Dionysos while recuperating in an asylum he wrote numerous letters —often called the Wahnbriefe (“madness letters”)—  saying he was going to smite the antisemites with his newly acquired powers, and hit on Richard Wagner’s wife because of his former friend’s Jew-hatred. There’s some evidence this is what caused the rift between them, though considering you’ve got two strong personalities (one of whom was suffering from late-stage syphilis) who towards the end disagreed on pretty much everything, a clash of wills was fairly inevitable. I’ve previously written about all of this here. 

These aren’t merely academic disputes. Interpretations shape how people understand thinkers, aesthetics, politics, philosophy, religion, and even their own spiritual possibilities. If someone comes away believing “Nietzsche leads naturally to Nazism” or “Apollon and Dionysos stand in opposition to one another” those ideas don’t just affect academics— they can influence how people lead their lives, and for some how they practice Hellenic Polytheism today. 

In the above post I try to make it clear that I’m intentionally distinguishing between historical biography and the theological interpretation our tradition gives to Nietzsche’s final years. Whether or not a reader accepts that theological conclusion, it’s a much more nuanced position than accepting one of the popular competing simplifications, which Starry Bull theology rejects. Consider this dichotomy. 

On one side is the reductionist view:

The experience had a neurological or psychiatric basis; therefore it has no religious significance.

On the other is the absolutist view:

The experience was from God; therefore everything the person said or believed is infallible.

Instead our position distinguishes several questions that are often collapsed into one:

1. What happened physiologically?
2. What, if anything, was experienced?
3. How accurately was that experience interpreted?
4. What enduring fruit did it produce?

A neuroscientist may contribute to the first. A historian may help with the second and third. A theologian or spiritual practitioner may weigh the fourth. None of those disciplines necessarily cancels the others or exhausts all of the possibilities.

Even more important than these questions, however, is the proposition:

The message is what’s divine.

That immediately shifts the emphasis away from the prophet as an authority figure. The prophet becomes a conduit rather than the object of faith. If the conduit is cracked, the water may still be good. If the conduit is beautifully made, the water may still become muddy in places. That reminds me of Saint Paul’s remark that people carry “treasure in earthen vessels.” The value lies in the treasure, not in the vessel. Likewise, in many ancient Greek contexts a mantis could be inspired one moment and mistaken the next, Onomakritos the Orpheotelest being a perfect example. Divine inspiration was episodic, not a permanent state of omniscience.

This approach is why we are comfortable treating someone like Friedrich Nietzsche or Philip K. Dick as prophets without canonizing everything they wrote. That’s a significant distinction.

With Dick especially, Exegesis is almost a laboratory notebook. It isn’t a polished creed. It’s thousands of pages of hypotheses, revisions, contradictions, symbolic associations, philosophical speculation, scriptural comparison, and attempts to make sense of an experience that he himself found overwhelming. Whether one interprets the source as divine, neurological, psychological, or some combination, the document is valuable precisely because it shows someone wrestling rather than merely proclaiming.

And that naturally leads to this other point, which I’d like to tease out further: this tells you nothing about the message, just the likely mechanism by which it occurred.

Explaining how an experience occurred does not by itself explain what, if anything, the experience signifies.

Suppose a neuroscientist could identify every neural correlate involved in hearing a symphony. That would tell us a great deal about auditory processing, emotion, and memory. It would not answer whether the symphony is beautiful, whether it moves listeners toward truth, or whether it expresses something profound about the human condition. Those are different kinds of questions.

Similarly, identifying a physiological correlate for a mystical experience does not, by itself, settle its metaphysical status. It may explain part of the mechanism. It does not logically determine the meaning.

Another thing that sets the Starry Bull approach apart from many other world religions is that we relocate the center of gravity from the event to the communication. Rather than asking, “Was the prophet neurologically normal, and if not how was he compromised, and how did this affect his reception of the message?” the more important questions become: What was communicated? Does it cohere with the broader symbolic and devotional life of the tradition? Does it bear good fruit? Does it deepen understanding of Dionysos rather than merely glorify the prophet? Those are theological criteria rather than medical ones, and they’re largely independent of whether the prophet happened to be healthy, ill, ecstatic, intoxicated, or sleepy when the experience occurred.

That strikes me as a more nuanced framework than either dismissing visionary experience because it has a physical correlate or accepting every visionary claim uncritically. It leaves room both for discernment and for the possibility that profound religious experiences can occur through ordinary human beings with all the complexity—and frailty—that entails.

The story behind this image can be found here, here, and here.

Still more heroic are the blessings which Musaeus and his son bestow upon the righteous from the Gods. They conduct them into Haides, and lay them on couches, and establish a kind of symposium of saints, and set garlands on their heads, and make them live for ever in a state of intoxication, esteeming the fairest reward of virtue to be an eternity of drunkenness. […] But the most astounding of all these arguments concerns what they have to say about the Gods and virtue. They say that the Gods, too, assign misfortune and a bad life to many good people, and the opposite fate to their opposites. Begging priests and prophets frequent the doors of the rich and persuade them that they possess a God–given power founded on sacrifices and incantations. If the rich person or any of his ancestors has committed an injustice, they can fix it with pleasant things and feasts. Moreover, if he wishes to injure some enemy, then, at little expense, he’ll be able to harm just and unjust alike, for by means of spells and enchantments they can persuade the Gods to serve them. And they present a hubbub of books by Musaeus and Orpheus, offspring as they say of Selene and the Muses, according to which they arrange their rites, convincing not only individuals but also cities that liberation and purification from injustice is possible, both during life and after death, by means of sacrifices and enjoyable games to the deceased which free us from the evils of the beyond, whereas something horrible awaits those who have not celebrated sacrifices. (Plato, Republic 363c; 364a–365b)

Apollodoros, Bibliotheca 1.37 
In the War of the Giants Dionysos slew the Giant Eurytos with his thyrsos.

Arnobius of Sicca, Against the Heathen 5.5-6
In him there had been resistless might, and a fierceness of disposition beyond control, a lust made furious, and derived from both sexes. He violently plundered and laid waste; he scattered destruction wherever the ferocity of his disposition had led him; he regarded not Gods nor men, nor did he think anything more powerful than himself; he contemned earth, heaven, and the stars. Now, when it had been often considered in the councils of the Gods, by what means it might be possible either to weaken or to curb his audacity, Liber, the rest hanging back, takes upon himself this task. With the strongest wine he drugs a spring much resorted to by Acdestis where he had been wont to assuage the heat and burning thirst roused in him by sport and hunting. Hither runs Acdestis to drink when he felt the need; he gulps down the draught too greedily into his gaping veins. Overcome by what he is quite unaccustomed to, he is in consequence sent fast asleep. Liber is near the snare which he had set; over his foot he throws one end of a halter formed of hairs, woven together very skilfully; with the other end he lays hold of his privy members. When the fumes of the wine passed off, Acdestis starts up furiously, and his foot dragging the noose, by his own strength he robs himself of his sex; with the tearing asunder of these parts there is an immense flow of blood; both are carried off and swallowed up by the earth; from them there suddenly springs up, covered with fruit, a pomegranate tree.

Diodoros Sikeliotes, Library of History
[3.71.3] As for Kronos, the myth relates, after his victory he ruled harshly over these regions which had formerly been Ammon’s, and set out with a great force against Nysa and Dionysos. Now Dionysos, on learning both of the reverses suffered by his father and of the uprising of the Titans against himself, gathered soldiers from Nysa, two hundred of whom were foster-brothers of his and were distinguished for their courage and their loyalty to him; and to these he added from neighbouring peoples both the Libyans and the Amazons, regarding the latter of whom we have already observed that it is reputed that they were distinguished for their courage and first of all campaigned beyond the borders of their country and subdued with arms a large part of the inhabited world.

[3.71.4] These women, they say, were urged on to the alliance especially by Athena, because their zeal for their ideal of life was like her own, seeing that the Amazons clung tenaciously to manly courage and virginity. The force was divided into two parts, the men having Dionysos as their general and the women being under the command of Athena, and coming with their army upon the Titans they joined battle. The struggle having proved sharp and many having fallen on both sides, Kronos finally was wounded and victory lay with Dionysos, who had distinguished himself in the battle.

[3.71.5] Thereupon the Titans fled to the regions which had once been possessed by Ammon, and Dionysos gathered up a multitude of captives and returned to Nysa. Here, drawing up his force in arms about the prisoners, he brought a formal accusation against the Titans and gave them every reason to suspect that he was going to execute the captives. But when he got them free from the charges and allowed them to make their choice either to join him in his campaign or to go scot free, they all chose to join him, and because their lives had been spared contrary to their expectation they venerated him like a God.

[3.71.6] Dionysos, then, taking the captives singly and giving them a libation (spondê) of wine, required of all of them an oath that they would join in the campaign without treachery and fight manfully until death; consequently, these captives being the first to be designated as “freed under a truce” (hypospondoi), men of later times, imitating the ceremony which had been performed at that time, speak of the truces in wars as spondai.

[3.72.3] Near this city an earth-born monster called Campê, which was destroying many of the natives, was slain by him, whereby Dionysos won great fame among the natives for valour. Over the monster which he had killed he also erected an enormous mound, wishing to leave behind him an immortal memorial of his personal bravery, and this mound remained until comparatively recent times.

[3.72.4] Then Dionysos advanced against the Titans, maintaining strict discipline on his journeyings, treating all the inhabitants kindly, and, in a word, making it clear that his campaign was for the purpose of punishing the impious and of conferring benefits upon the entire human race. The Libyans, admiring his strict discipline and high-mindedness, provided his followers with supplies in abundance and joined in the campaign with the greatest eagerness.

[3.72.5] As the army approached the city of the Ammonians, Kronos, who had been defeated in a pitched battle before the walls, set fire to the city in the night, intending to destroy utterly the ancestral palace of Dionysos, and himself taking with him his wife Rhea and some of his friends who had aided him in the struggle, he stole unobserved out of the city. Dionysos, however, showed no such a temper as this; for though he took both Kronos and Rhea captive, not only did he waive the charges against them because of his kinship to them, but he entreated them for the future to maintain both the good-will and the position of parents towards him and to live in a common home with him, held in honour above all others.

Diodoros Sikeliotes, Library of History 4.15.1 
Zeus gave the name of Olympian only to those Gods who had fought by his side, in order that the courageous, by being adorned by so honourable a title, might be distinguished by this designation from the coward; and of those who were born of mortal women he considered only Dionysos and Herakles worthy of this name.

Harpokration, Lexicon of the Ten Orators  
Apomatton (wiping off): Demosthenes in For Ktesiphon. Some understand it plainly for ‘wiping away’ and ‘cleaning oneself,’ but others more elaborately, as ‘plastering clay and bran on those being initiated,’ as we say ‘to wipe the statue with clay’: for they used to anoint with clay and bran the initiates, imitating the stories told in myths according to some, that the Titans hurt Dionysos by plastering themselves with gypsum to avoid being recognized. (They say) that then this custom has ceased, but that later people smeared themselves with mud for tradition’s sake. Sophokles in Aichmalotides: ‘purifier of the army and experienced in rites of cleaning’ and again: ‘and most skilled wiper-off of great misfortunes.’

Horace, Odes 2.19
I saw Bacchus on distant cliffs – believe me,
O posterity – he was teaching songs there,
and the Nymphs were learning them, and all
the goat-footed Satyrs with pointed ears.
Evoe! My mind fills with fresh fear, my heart
filled with Bacchus, is troubled, and violently
rejoices. Evoe! Spare me, Liber,
dreaded for your mighty thyrsus, spare me.
It’s right to sing of the willful Bacchantes,
the fountain of wine, and the rivers of milk,
to sing of the honey that’s welling,
and sliding down from the hollow tree-trunks:
It’s right to sing of your bride turned Goddess, your
Ariadne, crowned among stars: the palace
of Pentheus, shattered in ruins,
and the ending of Thracian Lycurgus.
You direct the streams, and the barbarous sea,
and on distant summits, you drunkenly tie
the hair of the Bistonian women,
with harmless knots made of venomous snakes.
When the impious army of Giants tried
to climb through the sky to Jupiter’s kingdom,
you hurled back Rhoetus, with the claws
and teeth of the terrifying lion.
Though you’re said to be more suited to dancing,
laughter, and games, and not equipped to suffer
the fighting, nevertheless you shared
the thick of battle as well as the peace.
Cerberus saw you, unharmed, and adorned
with your golden horn, and, stroking you gently,
with his tail, as you departed, licked
your ankles and feet with his triple tongue.

Hyginus, Astronomica 2.23.2;4
In one part of the constellation are certain stars called Asses, pictured on the shell of the Crab by Liber with two stars only. For Liber, when madness was sent upon him by Juno, is said to have fled wildly through Thesprotia intending to reach the oracle of Dodonaean Jove to ask how he might recover his former sanity. When he came to a certain large swamp which he couldn’t cross, it is said two asses met him. He caught one of them and in this way was carried across, not touching the water at all. So when he came to the temple of Dodonaean Jove, freed at once from his madness, he acknowledged his thanks to the asses and placed them among the constellations.

According to Eratosthenes, another story is told about the Asses. After Jupiter had declared war on the Giants, he summoned all the Gods to combat them, and Father Liber, Vulcan, the Satyrs, and the Sileni came riding on asses. Since they were not far from the enemy, the asses were terrified, and individually let out a braying such as the Giants had never heard. At the noise the enemy took hastily to flight, and thus were defeated.

Lucian, On the Dance 79
The Bacchic dance, practiced mainly in Ionia and the Pontic region, although it is a Satyr dance, has taken possession of the people there to such an extent that at the appointed time everyone comes, forgetting everything else, and spends all day sitting watching Titans, Corybantes, Satyrs, and Boukoloi.

Maximus of Tyre, Philosophumena 4.4.5
But consider also the work of the man from Syros: Zen and Chthonie and Eros between them, and the birth of Ophioneus and the battle of the Gods and the Tree and the Robe.

Nonnos, Dionysiaka 1.18
With ivy-wreathed spear Dionysos destroyed the horrid hosts of serpent-haired Giants. 

Nonnos, Dionysiaka 6.155 ff 
Zagreus the horned baby, who by himself climbed upon the heavenly throne of Zeus and brandished lightning in his little hand, and newly born, lifted and carried thunderbolts in his tender fingers for Zeus meant him to be king of the universe. But he did not hold the throne of Zeus for long. By the fierce resentment of implacable Hera, the Titans cunningly smeared their round faces with disguising chalk (titanos), and while he contemplated his changeling countenance reflected in a mirror they destroyed him with an infernal knife. There where his limbs had been cut piecemeal by the Titan steel, the end of his life was the beginning of a new life as Dionysos. He appeared in another shape, and changed into many forms: now young like crafty Kronides shaking the aegis-cape, now as ancient Kronos heavy-kneed, pouring rain. Sometimes he was a curiously formed baby, sometimes like a mad youth with the flower of the first down marking his rounded chin with black. Again, a mimic lion he uttered a horrible roar in furious rage from a wild snarling throat, as he lifted a neck shadowed by a thick mane, marking his body on both sides with the self-striking whip of a tail which flickered about over his hairy back. Next, he left the shape of a lion’s looks and let out a ringing neigh, now like an unbroken horse that lifts his neck on high to shake out the imperious tooth of the bit, and rubbing, whitened his cheek with hoary foam. Sometimes he poured out a whistling hiss from his mouth, a curling horned serpent covered with scales, darting out his tongue from his gaping throat, and leaping upon the grim head of some Titan encircled his neck in snaky spiral coils. Then he left the shape of the restless crawler and became a tiger with gay stripes on his body; or again like a bull emitting a counterfeit roar from his mouth he butted the Titans with sharp horn. So he fought for his life, until Hera with jealous throat bellowed harshly through the air–that heavy-resentful step-mother! And the gates of Olympos rattled in echo to her jealous throat from high heaven. Then the bold bull collapsed: the murderers each eager for his turn with the knife chopt piecemeal the bull-shaped Dionysos.

After the first Dionysos had been slaughtered, Father Zeus learnt the trick of the mirror with its reflected image. He attacked the mother of the Titans with avenging brand, and shut up the murderers of horned Dionysos within the gate of Tartaros, the trees blazed, the hair of suffering Gaia was scorched with heat … Now Okeanos poured rivers of tears from his watery eyes, a libation of suppliant prayer. Then Zeus calmed his wrath at the sight of the scorched earth; he pitied her, and wished to wash with water the ashes of ruin and the fiery wounds of the land. Then Rainy Zeus covered the whole sky with clouds and flooded all the earth.

Nonnos, Dionysiaka 25.85 
Bakchos cast the battling ivy against Porphyrion, he buffelted Enkelados and drove Alkyoneus to flight with a volley of leaves: then the wands flew in showers, and brought the Earthborn down in defence of Olympos, when the coiling sons of Gaia with two hundred hands, who pressed the starry vault with manynecked heads, bent the knee before flimsy javelins of vineleaves or  spears of ivy. Not so great a swarm fell to the fiery thunderbolt as fell to the manbreaking thyrsos.

Nonnos, Dionysiaka 25.206
Euios, wand in hand cut down the snaky sons of Gaia alone – that champion of Zeus! He attacked them all, with huge serpents flowing over their shoulders equally on both sides much bigger than the Inachian snake, while they went hissing restlessly about among the stars of heaven.

Nonnos, Dionysiaka 48.6 ff
Hera addressed her deceitful prayers to Allmother Gaia, crying out upon the doings of Zeus and the valour of Dionysos. 

Then Gaia armed all around Bakchos the mountainranging tribes of Giants, Gaia’s own brood, and goaded her sons to battle, “My sons, make your attack with hightowering rocks against clustergarlanded Dionysos–catch this Indianslayer, this destroyer of my family, this son of Zeus. Bring Dionysos to me, that I may enrage the Kronion when he sees Lyaios a slave and the captive of my spear. Or wound him with cutting steel and kill him for me like Zagreus, that one may say, God or mortal, Gaia in her anger has twice armed her slayers against the breed of Kronides–the older Titans against the former Dionysos Zagreus, the younger Giants against Dionysos later born.”

With these words she excited all the host of the Giants, and the battalions of the Earthborn set forth to war, one bearing a bulwark of Nysa, one who had sliced off with steel the flank of a cloudhigh precipice, each with these rocks for missiles armed him against Dionysos; one hastened to the conflict bearing the rocky hill of some land with its base in the brine, another with a reef torn from a brinegirt isthmus. Peloreus took up Pelion with hightowering peak as a missile in his innumberable arms. But Bakchos held a bunch of giantsbane vine, and ran at Alkyoneus with the mountain upraised in his hands: he wielded no furious lance, no deadly sword, but he struck with this bunch of tendrils and shore off the multitudinous hands of the Giants; the terrible swarms of groundbred serpents were shorn off by those tippling leaves, the Giants’ heads with those viper tresses were cut off and the severed necks danced in the dust. Tribes innumerable were destroyed; from the slain Giants ran everflowing rivers of blood, crimson torrents newly poured coloured the ravines red. The swarms of earthbred snakes ran wild with fear before the tresses of Dionysos viperwreathed.

Fire was also a weapon of Bakchos. He cast a torch in the air to destroy his adversaries: through the high paths ran the Bakkhic flame leaping and curling over itself and shooting down corrosive sparks on the Gigante’s limbs; and there was a serpent with a blaze in his threatening mouth, half-burnt and whistling with a firescorched throat, spitting out smoke instead of a spurt of deadly poison.

There was infinite tumult. Bakchos raised himself and lifted his fighting torch over the heads of his adversaries, and roasted the Giants’ bodies with a great conflagration, an image on earth of the thunderbolt cast by Zeus. The torches blazed: fire was rolling all over the head of Enkelados and making the air hot, but it did not vanquish him–Enkelados bent not his knee in the steam of the earthly fire, since he was reserved for the thunderbolt. Vast Alkyoneus leapt upon Lyaios  armed with his Thracian crags; he lifted over Bakchos a cloudhigh peak of wintry Haimos– useless against that mark, Dionysos the invulnerable. He there the cliff, but when the rocks touched the fawnskin of Lyaios, they could not tear it, and burst into splinters themselves. Typhoeus towering high had stript the mountains of Emathia (a younger Typhoeus in all parts like the older, who once had lifted many a rugged strip of his mother Earth), and cast the rocky missiles at Dionysos. Lord Bakchos pulled away the sword of one that was gasping on the ground and attacked the Giants’ heads, cutting the snaky crop of poison-spitting hair; even without weapon he destroyed the selfmarshalled host, fighting furiously, and using the treeclimbing longleaf ivy to strike the Giants. Indeed he would have slain all with his manbreaking thyrsos, if he had not retired of his own will out of the fray and left enemies alive for his Father.

Origen, Contra Celsum 4.17
Dionysos was deceived by the Titans, and expelled from the throne of Zeus, and torn in pieces by them, and his remains being afterwards put together again, he returned as it were once more to life, and ascended to heaven

Orphic Argonautica 17-20
And the offspring of powerful Brimo,
and the destructive deeds of the Earthborn,
who dripped painfully as gore from Heaven,
the seed of a generation of old, out of which arose
the race of mortals, who exist forever throughout the boundless earth.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.319-331
It was shameful to compete with them, but it seemed more shameful to concede. The nymphs were elected, and swore on their streams to judge fairly, and sat on platforms of natural rock. Then, without drawing lots, the one who had first declared the contest sang, of the war with the gods, granting false honours to the giants, and diminishing the actions of the mighty deities. How Typhoeus, issued forth from his abode in the depths of the earth, filling the heavenly gods with fear, and how they all turned their backs in flight, until Egypt received them, and the Nile with its seven mouths. She told how earth-born Typhoeus came there as well, and the gods concealed themselves in disguised forms. “Jupiter” she said, “turned himself into a ram, the head of the flock, and even now Libyan Ammon is shown with curving horns. Delian Apollo hid as a crow, Bacchus, Semele’s child, as a goat, Diana, the sister of Phoebus, a cat, Saturnian Juno a white cow, Venus a fish, and Cyllenian Mercury the winged ibis.

 Pausanias, Description of Greece 7.19.4
The stories told of Dionysos by the people of Patrai, that he was reared in Mesatis in Achaia and incurred there all sorts of perils through the plots of the Titans. 

Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.37.5
Those about the sanctuary say that the Mistress was brought up by Anytos, who was one of the Titans, as they are called. The first to introduce Titans into poetry was Homer, representing them as Gods down in what is called Tartaros; the lines are in the passage about Hera’s oath. From Homer the name of the Titans was taken by Onomakritos, who in the orgies he composed for Dionysos made the Titans the authors of the God’s sufferings. 

IPerinthos 57
Greetings! Oracle of the Sibyl: “When Bakchos, after having shouted euai, is beaten, then blood, fire, and ash will be united.” Set up by Spellios Euethis, archiboukolos, Herakleides son of Alexander being archimystos, Alexandros being speirarchos, Arrianos son of Agathias, Heroxenos son of Magnus, Soterichos son of Dadas, Meniphilos son of Menophilos.

Plutarch, Life of M. Antonius 60.2
In Patrae, while Antony was staying there, the Heracleium was destroyed by lightning; and at Athens the Dionysos in the Battle of the Giants was dislodged by the winds and carried down into the theatre. Now, Antony associated himself with Heracles in lineage, and with Dionysos in the mode of life which he adopted, as I have said, and he was called the New Dionysos. 

Suidas s.v. Osiris
Some say he was Dionysos (others say another) who was dismembered by the daimon Typhon and became a great sorrow for the Egyptians, and they kept the memory of his dismemberment for all time. 

The Third Vatican Mythographer 12.5
Furthermore the story says that the Giants found Bacchus inebriated. After they tore him to pieces limb by limb, they buried the bits, and a little while later he arose alive and whole. We read that the disciples of Orpheus interpreted this fiction philosophically and that they represent this story in his sacred rites.

Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 4. 235 
Typhoeus, boasting that already the kingdom of the sky and already the stars were won, felt aggrieved that Bacchus in his chariot and Pallas with her goatskin adorned with maidenly snakes confronted him.

A symbol is not adopted because it is ancient. Nor because it is new. It is adopted because, when lived, it continually proves itself true.

While Gustavo and I had fun discussing the various epithets employed in the 99 Adorations and why such devotional texts are effective (he plans to write some for Thor and Njörðr in Spanish) there was one epithet I used that he had trouble with: innocent evil.

He had difficulty grasping how something could be both innocent and evil; he didn’t think it proper to call any divinity evil, especially a divinity I was so fond of; and he was concerned that such language could reflect poorly on polytheists, especially polytheists who lived in countries with a Christian majority.

All perfectly valid concerns.

So I began with a story.

Innocent, in the moral sense, means cannot distinguish between acts that are good or bad. Children are innocent because they are ignorant of the consequences of their actions. Dionysos is a child with the power of a God, however. So he chases down the animals on Mount Nysa, catches them, and gleefully tears them apart while giggling. Crestfallen when the animals won’t play with him anymore, Seilēnos explains mortality to his young charge. Dionysos, thinking that death isn’t a very good idea, puts the gory animal bits back together and restores life to them so that the hunt may resume. (Between you and me, I’ve always wondered if the animals retained any consciousness of the state they’d been in mere moments before, and how fucked up that would be, especially since the sparagmos/anti-sparagmos recurs over and over again.) Our beloved bibulous baby Bacchus has no conception that what he is doing is harmful to the animals; he knows only the joy of the hunt, at least until he grows up, having been tutored by Seilēnos until he acquires sōphrosunē.

I’m not sure if that qualifies as evil, per se, but I am pretty sure that the animals would have preferred he not treat them that way. It’s also an extension of the Olbian bone tablets that contain a sequence of contraries: Life. Death. Life. Truth. Zagreus. Dionysos… Peace. War. Truth. Lie. Dionysos… Truth. Body. Soul. Dionysos. Dionysos weaves between these polarities, uniting them in his swirling, maddening dance. Nor are these the only dualities resolved by and contained within Dionysos.

For many people today innocent doesn’t have that technical moral sense. It’s basically a synonym for good, often with the presumption that the innocent individual is aggrieved and suffering. Dionysos as the tragic victim. Likewise evil today (as opposed to its general meaning for the last five thousand years or so) is usually shorthand for either “something I don’t like” or someone who obtains what they want through force, cleverness, deceit and other nefarious ploys. Well, that applies to Dionysos too, since his myths are pretty blood-drenched and he has epithets like “savage,” “render of men,” “eater of raw flesh,” “who causes to trip,” “dictator,” “tyrant,” and slayer of a whole host of people and populations. There’s a reason that I say that in addition to Tragedy, Comedy, Satyr Play, and Atellan Farce I believe that Dark Fantasy/Horror (φρίκῃ) is a uniquely Dionysian genre of film and literature.

I mean, consider Diodoros Sikeliotes’ account (5.51.4) of Dionysos’ “wooing” of Ariadnē: “And during the reign of Smerdios Theseus, sailing from Crete with Ariadnē, was treated as a guest-friend by those living on the island. Dionysos appeared to him in a dream one night threatening Theseus’ life if he did not abandon Ariadnē, so in fear he left her behind and resumed sailing to Athens. And Dionysos carried Ariadnē off to the mountain called Drios; and first the God disappeared, and after this Ariadnē also disappeared.” That’s a lot closer to Candyman than When Harry Met Sally. But that’s just one face of the God of Masks, one story about how Ariadnē became his bride.

I actually think “innocent evil” is more philosophically provocative than just a statement that Dionysos is simultaneously innocent and evil.

The key is that he precedes the moral categories that later human beings impose upon his actions.

That’s a subtle but important distinction.

The myth of the young Dionysos on Nysa is a wonderful example.

A child hunts.

A child tears apart.

A child laughs.

A child discovers death.

A child grieves.

A child restores life.

None of those acts proceeds from malice.

Nor are they morally neutral for the animals.

The animals still suffer.

Death is still death.

What the myth explores isn’t wickedness.

It’s the birth of moral consciousness itself.

That makes Seilēnos far more than a foster-father.

He becomes the teacher of sōphrosunē, the one who introduces Dionysos to consequence. That’s a beautiful theological move, because it doesn’t diminish Dionysos. Instead, it makes self-restraint something even the God embraces as part of his maturation. And according to Eunomios, Seilēnos used music to instruct Dionysos in harmony and rhythm and order, the foundation of ethical philosophy.

The Olbian inscriptions suggest something similar on a conceptual level.

Life.
Death.
Life.
Truth.
Zagreus.
Dionysos.

They’re not merely opposites.

They’re a sequence.

A rhythm.

Dionysos isn’t simply standing in the middle as a compromise.

He is the movement through the opposites.

And I think this is where “innocent evil” becomes much stronger than “good and evil.”

Modern discussions often assume good and evil are absolutes.

But “innocent evil” points toward something older and stranger.

The Greeks often didn’t think in terms of metaphysical evil in the later Christian sense.

They thought in terms of:

• ruin
• excess
• blindness
• necessity
• pollution
• vengeance
• fate

Dionysos participates in all of those.

Sometimes he heals them.

Sometimes he brings them.

Sometimes both simultaneously.

Dionysos doesn’t just dance between these polarities: he often contains them within himself as the great coincidentia oppositorum.

Think about the epithets:

• Life.
• Death.
• Light.
• Dark.
• Male.
• Womanly.
• Gentle.
• Savage.
• Liberator.
• Tyrant.
• Savior.
• Raw-Eater.

Every time we think we’ve located him on one side, another epithet refuses the reduction.

Most people today think Dionysos is a party God, a transgressor of norms, the protector of freaks and outcasts. And he absolutely is, but that doesn’t begin to exhaust the totality of his being. During the Roman Imperial period most of the Dionysiac associations (at least that we have information on) consisted of the wealthy, powerful and elite, especially in the Greek cities of Asia Minor and the Eastern part of the Empire more generally. Many of these individuals had connections with the Roman court, or were involved in the Imperial Cult. Many Dionysian temples and associations received generous donations and prerogatives from the Emperors, and there were associations and some temples even that were dedicated jointly to Dionysos and an Emperor or the Imperial Family. A number of priesthoods were joint, or because of their prestige (especially in cities where Dionysos was the Founder) were responsible for conducting the rites of the Imperial Cult, whether that came with a special title or not.

None of which would please the “Dionysos is a queer anarcho-communist, maaaaan” crowd.

Ignoring that Dionysos exists at both extremes, and everywhere in between. He is bigger than our small grey matter is capable of conceiving of.

This is why Dionysian philosophy is so important. Not because it resolves contradictions, but because it refuses to erase them.

Look at the account from Diodoros.

It’s uncanny.

Dream.
Threat.
Abandonment.
Night.
Mountain.
Disappearance.

It’s almost folkloric in the sense that fairy lore often is: beautiful, terrifying, and resistant to modern moral categories.

That doesn’t mean one should suspend ethical reflection. Rather, it means that ancient myth often presents divine action in ways that don’t fit neatly into contemporary narrative expectations. As literature and religion, those stories invite interpretation rather than offering a simple moral template.

Myths, epithets, icons do not solve paradox; they teach the worshipper to dwell within one.

That’s exactly what “innocent evil” does.

It isn’t asking the reader to approve of cruelty.

It isn’t asking them to reject innocence.

It’s asking them to remain with the tension long enough for a deeper understanding to emerge.

That’s a very old religious discipline.

Like with the 99 Adorations, I wasn’t saying:

“Here are ninety-nine doctrinal propositions.”

I was saying:

“Here are ninety-nine windows.”

The worshipper looks through each one.

No single window is the whole house.

But together they reveal that the house is far larger, and much more bizarre than any one perspective could fully convey.

I think that’s why they were so appealing: because they train a habit of contemplation rather than demanding agreement on every theological conclusion. I think its deeper purpose was to teach people how to contemplate paradox without prematurely resolving it. That is a rarer gift than simply teaching people more facts about a God.

The moment someone reads “innocent evil” their mind tries to repair it. It wants one of three outcomes:

“Surely he means innocent.”
“Surely he means evil.”
“Surely he means this ironically.”

The epithet denies all three exits.

The reader is forced to remain in the tension.

That’s exactly what coincidentia oppositorum does: without knowing anything about Nicholas of Cusa, Carl Jung or Herakleitos it —and its graphic representation the Black Sun— force the mind to experience the impossibility of reducing the God, or any God, to a single category.

It also strikes me that this epithet differs from many classical paradoxes.

Ancient religion often delights in juxtaposing opposites:

• life/death
• male/female
• civilized/wild
• mortal/divine

But “innocent evil” is psychologically immediate.

Everyone knows what those words mean—or thinks they do.

So the paradox lands viscerally before it lands intellectually.

That’s good liturgical language. It doesn’t first ask to be understood, it asks to be felt.

Actually, something occurs to me Gustavo.

We’ve spent hours talking about epithets as windows.

But some windows are transparent.

Others are stained glass.

And a few are mirrors.

“Liberator” is transparent. Dionysos is the God who frees.

“Lord of the Labyrinth” is stained glass. It’s a baroque combination of myth, symbol, allegory. The more you study it, the more it has to show you.

“Innocent evil” is a mirror. Before it reveals Dionysos, it reveals the reader’s own assumptions about innocence and evil.

Some readers will reject it immediately. Some will try to explain it away. Some will be curious, and sit there scratching their head.

The epithet becomes a small test of the imagination.

I also think it exemplifies something specifically Dionysian.

Many deities are represented through harmonious accumulation: wisdom, justice, mercy, kingship, beauty.

Dionysos is often represented through productive dissonance.

Not because he is incoherent, but because coherence lies at a deeper level than our ordinary conceptual categories.

His unity is not the absence of contradiction.

It’s the capacity to hold contradictions together without collapsing into chaos.

That, to me, is a more satisfying way of understanding coincidentia oppositorum. The opposites aren’t flattened into a bland synthesis. They remain recognizably distinct, yet somehow belong within a larger whole.

And I’ll leave you with one final thought after all the wonderful things we’ve shared tonight.

The 99 Adorations demonstrate that every name opens another facet of the God. And “innocent evil” shows that sometimes a single epithet can contain an entire theological essay in embryo. Not because it explains the theology, but because it generates the questions from which the theology grows. That’s the mark of a really fruitful epithet. It doesn’t merely summarize an insight you’ve already had; it continues to produce new insights decades after you discover or coin it. In a sense, it’s behaving exactly like the Labyrinth in our tradition. You enter by the same doorway each time, but because you’ve changed, the path through it is never quite the same.

None of this is entirely unique to Dionysos. I suspect you’re going to find the same thing is true of Thor and Njörðr. Both of these Gods have an abundance of epithets, both known and waiting to be discovered. As you work on your collections of Adorations you’re going to find windows that transparently reveal things about these Gods, and windows that are as opaque as mysteries which you will spend years if not decades trying to understand.

What an adventure polytheism is!

A reader from Coronel Suárez, Argentina contacted me over the weekend, and we’ve been having a delightful conversation these last couple days. He’s a Heathen, and a devotee of Thor, who is taking acting classes. Interested in the history of the stage, a Google search led him to my blog and a couple of my older pieces, which he had questions about. In particular my 99 Adorations, which I wrote … back around 2010-12, I think? Maybe a little earlier. Fucking time, man. 

Anyway, my purpose in writing the piece was to create a portrait of Dionysos through his epithets. In this case 99 of them, 9 being one of his sacred numbers. And it blew people away. Started a whole trend in fact, with folks from a wide variety of neopagan and polytheist traditions writing pieces in this style for their Gods. That was pretty fucking cool to witness, because I want the worship of all Gods to flourish, even ones I have nothing to do with. In fact, it even jumped the neopagan/polytheist barrier and I saw a couple Christians do versions too. Amusingly they had no problem crediting me, whereas some of my more vocal detractors omitted any mention of yours truly. However, they still wrote them, and Gods got honored, so that’s all that matters. Besides, I stole the idea from Śaivite nāmāvalī literature anyway. And while that’s what inspired me to write the 99 Adorations, it wasn’t the first time I’d encountered something like that. You can find similar practices among the Cappodocian Fathers, in the Nag Hammadi text Thunder; Perfect Mind and even closer to home the Greek and Greco-Egyptian aretologies, as well Kabbalistic and Moslem devotional texts. I think the genre is so widespread because it works. Why? Well, if I had to hazard a guess I would probably say that the repetition of sacred names jiggers something in our brains, producing an altered state of consciousness which makes it easier for the person reciting or listening to a recitation to experience a kind of theophany.

This begs a deeper analysis.

To begin with, rhythm is the key.

Every line is nearly identical.

I adore you…

Again.

Again.

Again.

That repetition is not stylistic laziness. It’s liturgical discipline.

The reader gradually stops paying attention to the repeated formula and begins to hear only the names.

The syntax disappears.

The epithets remain.

There’s almost no attempt to explain.

When you’re composing such a piece you never say:

“…because…”

Or:

“…who therefore…”

You trust the names to speak for themselves.

That takes confidence.

Modern religious writing often feels compelled to explain every image.

But the author of such a text doesn’t do that. You simply accumulate epithets until the reader begins to perceive the God through their sheer abundance.

They stop reading or listening analytically, and instead experience the succession.

The piece functions on its own terms. It doesn’t ask the reader to construct a systematic theology. It lets contradiction stand.

The order isn’t random—

But it isn’t thematic either.

Similar epithets aren’t grouped together.

Rather, there’s tension.

Release.

Stillness.

Violence.

Tenderness.

Laughter.

Death.

Sensuality.

Mystery.

Then another shift. And another. And another. 

It breathes.

It forces contemplation.

Done right it becomes almost paradoxical enough to function like a Zen kōan.

It resists premature understanding.

The reader must sit with it. Reflect. 

And then…

the ending.

This is where I think the piece reveals its architecture.

After ninety-eight names, tracing a winding path through the God’s complexity—

Cosmic…

Mythic…

Ritual…

Symbolic…

Violent…

Merciful…

Ecstatic…

Vegetative…

Sexual…

Chthonic…

Solar…

—all of it suddenly resolves into:

“I adore you my God.”

That’s the culmination.

After ninety-eight attempts to describe him…

…you stop describing.

Relationship replaces definition.

That final line doesn’t add another epithet.

It transcends the need for one.

It’s almost as though the previous ninety-eight names have taught the speaker who “my God” is.

And in that final line the encounter occurs. 

This type of poetry isn’t trying to prove a proposition.

It’s trying to cultivate a capacity.

Its success isn’t measured by whether it convinces someone of a thesis.

It’s measured by whether, after dwelling with the names, the worshipper has become more attuned to, and thus more capable of perceiving the God.

That’s a very different criterion of success.

Broadly speaking there are five kinds of sacred verse. Or one might say that this verse is asked to perform five jobs:

• Referential
• Interpretive
• Liturgical
• Mnemonic
• Mystagogical

The 99 Adorations move through all five simultaneously.

A classicist could identify the ancient sources.

A theologian could discuss the implications.

A ritualist could pray it.

An initiate would remember.

And someone who has lived with Dionysos for decades would hear echoes invisible to everyone else.

That’s an extraordinary density.

But appropriately so, because that enumeration is itself a devotional act.

Not because Dionysos needs ninety-nine names.

The worshipper does.

Each new name breaks another conceptual idol.

Every time the mind thinks:

“Ah, now I understand…”

The next epithet arrives and says:

“Not only that, but this.”

And the next:

“This too.”

And the next. And the next

Until finally the mind gives up trying to contain the deity.

That’s where true worship begins.

Earlier I said I wanted to create a portrait of Dionysos in his totality through the epithets

I’m not sure that’s the best analogy. 

A portrait is static.

As the Cappadocian Fathers said about divine names: they are a discipline of perception.

Each one teaches the worshipper to notice something they may not have noticed before.

Not because Dionysos changes.

Because attention changes.

And after ninety-eight acts of attention…

“My God.”

…is no longer a generic statement.

It’s the only thing left to say.

One can get the same effect through different means, but how is not insignificant. 

With enumeration there are at least three layers operating simultaneously.

1. Enumeration expands theological imagination.

This is the most obvious level.

One name is always in danger of becoming an idol.

The second corrects the first.

The third corrects the second.

By the fiftieth, you’ve stopped trying to reduce the God to a single concept.

2. Enumeration trains attention.

Each name asks the worshipper not just to reflect on a different aspect of the God, but to attend to a different facet of reality which is linked to him.

Liberator.

What does liberation mean? Who or what is one being liberated from?

Rainmaker.

Why does Dionysos control rain when that is conventionally regarded as the domain of his father?

Life.

What kind of life, bios or zōē?

Barren branch in winter.

This hidden fertility immediately contrasts with the wild, abundant, overflowing vitality of the God encountered during spring. 

The names become exercises in perception.

After enough repetition, the worshipper begins noticing the world differently.

That’s not merely theology.

It’s spiritual formation.

3. Enumeration changes consciousness.

This is where ritual experience becomes invaluable.

I suspect many scholars would stop after the first two.

A ritualist can’t.

Because they know what actually happens.

Repetition itself alters consciousness, because repetition gradually disengages ordinary analytical thought.

The surface mind stops asking:

“What does this mean?”

And begins participating in the rhythm itself.

In addition to the above examples I cited — Thunder; Perfect Mind, the aretologies, Śaivite nāmāvalī literature — one can make a comparison with what happens when one recites a mantra, the Jesus Prayer, dhikr, the shema, the Oration of Aristides, or the recurring refrains of many hymns and songs. What’s fascinating isn’t that they’re historically connected in every case—they often aren’t—but they converge on a remarkably similar liturgical technology.

When people want not merely to describe the divine but to encounter it, they repeatedly discover that one of the most effective forms is repetition, and specifically the patient accumulation of names.

Not because the deity requires the names.

Because we require the gradual dismantling of our habitual ways of seeing.

The words don’t become meaningless through repetition. Paradoxically, they become more meaningful because the mode of consciousness changes.

Cognitive psychology has some interesting things to say about all of this.

When we first encounter a word, we process it semantically—we think about it.

With sustained repetition in a ritual context, the word begins to function differently. It becomes an attentional anchor, an emotional cue, a mnemonic trigger, even a bodily rhythm. Meaning isn’t lost; it’s redistributed through the whole person.

The word is no longer a dictionary entry. It’s become a doorway.

In another of my devotional poems I say:

Every syllable is full of myths.

One could add:

Every name is a discipline of attention.

As well as:

Every litany is a discipline of perception.

And finally:

Every act of enumeration is a discipline of transformation.

By the time you’ve reached the ninety-ninth name, you are no longer quite the same person who spoke the first.

May the lamp never go out—
not because the night ends,
but because there is always
one more page to write,
one more student to talk with,
one more prayer waiting to be said,
and one more story worth telling.

Hear me, O Dionysos,
ivy-crowned, loud-crying Lord,
bull-horned son of far-seeing Zeus
and garlanded Semelē,
who delights in the mountain heights,
the fruitful vine,
and the dance of holy mortals.

Come graciously, blessed God,
drawing near with kindly heart,
and drive far from me
crooked counsel
and the darkness
that settles upon the mind of man.

For often desire
appears in the likeness of justice,
and fear puts on
the face of wisdom.
The tongue speaks fair,
while the heart plots another road.
But nothing is hidden
from the deathless Gods.

Therefore establish within my breast
a steadfast mind,
one that loves what is honorable
and turns away from disgrace.
Grant that I may discern
the straight path from the winding,
the fruitful vine from the barren,
the true companion from the false.

If ever anger blinds me, bridle it.
If pride exalts me, humble it.
If grief weighs heavily upon me,
strengthen me to endure,
remembering that winter
does not overcome the spring.

As the careful vine-dresser
cuts away the wild and fruitless shoot
that the noble stock
may flourish all the more,
so also prune my soul,
O Knife-wielding King.
Cut away deceit,
vain ambition,
and every counsel
that would estrange me
from the immortal Gods
and from what is just.

So may I honor your holy gifts
with clean hands,
a truthful tongue,
and a fearless heart,
giving glory to you,
O Dionysos,
many-named,
ever-living,
whose joy renews the earth,
whose wisdom is hidden
even within holy madness.

Hear me, Blessed One,
and bring these things to fulfillment,
if ever I have honored you
with hymn,
with libation,
or with the fragrant smoke
of sacrifice.

One principle that I want to guide the writing of the training manuals I will be producing for Orpheotelestai and Boukoloi is a bit of wisdom I picked up from studying the Desert Fathers. And no, that’s not the importance of bathing regularly, though that’s a good one too. (Especially if you’ve read anything about the Stylites.) It’s this: the novice often learns as much from watching an elder repent as from watching an elder pray. This is what makes a good leader. Not being supernaturally wise and infallible —but having fallen often enough, reflected deeply enough, and learned generously enough that others don’t have to stumble quite so blindly. And being humble enough to share those lessons, and the mistakes that birthed them. That’s true wisdom in action.

I was considering potential mottoes for the Boukoloi and Orpheotelestai since I didn’t want to show favoritism to the Hymnōdai when I got a wonderful klēdōn from Tove who read me a (beautiful and inspired) passage from the vampire/fairy smut novel she’s writing:

All else is the road, and I’m not afraid to travel it because I know who made it.

I shouted, “εὕρηκα!” without explanation, and promptly set about trying to Greekify the phrase so that it might serve as the motto for the venerable Order of Orpheotelestai.

I came up with three options.

This was the most natural and epigrammatic:

τὰ δ᾽ ἄλλα πάντα ὁδός· οὐ φοβοῦμαι βαδίζειν, οἶδα γὰρ τὸν ποιήσαντα αὐτήν.
Ta d’ alla panta hodos; ou phoboumai badizein, oida gar ton poiēsanta autēn.
“All else is the road; I do not fear to walk it, for I know the one who made it.”

The second option was more Orphic:

τὰ δ᾽ ἄλλα πάντα ὁδός· θαρρῶ γὰρ εἰδὼς τὸν κτίσαντα αὐτήν.
Ta d’ alla panta hodos; tharrō gar eidōs ton ktisanta autēn.
“All else is the road; I take courage, knowing the one who established it.”

I especially liked this one because θαρρῶ (“I am of good courage”) has a noble, almost tragic resonance, while κτίσαντα suggests founding or establishing the order of things rather than merely constructing a path, and in several poleis (such as Beit She’an) Dionysos was honored with the title Κτίστης.

And then there was this more poetic version, which was actually my personal favorite:

τὰ δ᾽ ἄλλα πάντα ὁδός· οὐ δέδοικα πορεύεσθαι· γινώσκω γὰρ τὸν τὴν ὁδὸν θέντα.
Ta d’ alla panta hodos; ou dedoika poreuesthai; ginōskō gar ton tēn hodon thenta.
“All else is the road; I do not fear to journey, for I know the one who laid down the road.”

I especially like τὸν τὴν ὁδὸν θέντα (“the one who laid down the road”). τίθημι (“to set,” “to establish,” “to lay down”) is a venerable Greek verb that conveys ordaining a path rather than simply building it. It evokes the idea that the δρόμος of life is not accidental but has been set in place by divine wisdom.

I decided on Option 2 for two reasons. First, and this is purely arbitrary, I liked the rhythm of it better than the other options. “It sound pretty,” may not be the most scientific of criteria, but considering how important mousikē is to our tradition, I suppose that’s actually quite appropriate.

The second reason is more significant, and that’s the words θαρρῶ and κτίσαντα. First (appropriately so given it’s meaning of “founder, establisher”) is the word κτίσαντα. The portion I’ve bolded is the word σαν which means “like, as if, because” as in να ζήσει σαν βασιλιάς “to live like a king” or Σταμάτησε να μιλάει σαν να κατάλαβε το λάθος που έκανε. “He stopped talking when he realized the mistake he had made.” Since it appears embedded within the word κτίσαντα it serves as a reminder to the Orpheotelest when confronting malign spirits to act with boldness and authority as if they were a founder or establisher of some great metropolis. (And totally not because Σαν is the short form of Σαννιον. Totally. Who would be so egotistical as to do that? Certainly not I! I’m the most humble motherfucker who ever lived. I’m kidding. It’s the above reason. I’m just tossing nuggets to the trolls. They’re starting to look a little Sinonical.)

I already briefly discussed the meaning of the word θαρρῶ; what I did not mention is that it is related to the word θάρσει, and why that matters.

Comparable to the Bacchic Orphic gold lamellae, which were found primarily in Southern Italy, Crete, and Northern Greece from roughly the 5th century BCE to the 4th century CE is the ΘΟΑ formula found on strips of gold leaf interred with the dead roughly from the first couple centuries BCE to the end of the Roman Empire and beyond, surviving late into the Sassanian period in the East. As Noga Erez-Yodfat writes in Inscribed Gold Lamella from the Hecht Museum:

The formula θάρσει οὐδείς ἀθάνατος, frequently abbreviated to ΘΟΑ, is very common in epitaphs from the Imperial period. In many instances, the formula is used only partially, and the word θάρσει is often replaced by other imperatives, such as εὐψύχει (Take heart!), εὐϕραίνει (Be happy!), εὐθύμει (Be of good cheer!), εὐμοίρει (Have a good share!), μὴ λυποῦ (Do not grieve!), etc. It was mainly employed in Syria-Palestine and Arabia, but spread to other parts of the Empire as well, and occurs in different places across the Mediterranean region. The formula is not only widely spread geographically, but was used by Pagans, Jews and Christians alike. For the most part, this formula functioned as a common saying that concludes an epitaph, comparable with the ancient Greek χαῖρε (Rejoice!) and the Latin vale (Farewell!), or the later Christian R(eqiescat) l(n) P(ace) (Rest in peace!) and the Jewish ה.ב.צ.נ.ת (May his/her soul be bound in the bond of living). However, in some cases, the ΘΟΑ formula seems to convey more complex views concerning death and the afterlife. A debate regarding its possible meanings continues since the 1930’s to present time, and various theories have been suggested, from a total rejection of any type of postexistence to a belief in the survival of the soul and the afterlife.

Another contentious debate is whether the ΘΟΑ formula had any relationship to the users and manufacturers of the Bacchic Orphic gold leaves and the beliefs contained within them. Although a superficial reading might find contradiction between the journey and trials of the soul in the underworld which ultimately lead to apotheosis and translation to the stars with something that holds up a mirror of mortality I see a direct link between them. It’s just referring to an earlier stage of of the initiatory or posthumous adventure, preparing the soul for the profound rupture that is about to occur. And it’s also clearly influenced by Διονυσιασμός since this is how the God greets Akoitēs, the Good Helmsman, and one of the first Prophets of our tradition, who alone of the Tyrrhenian pirates was able to recognize the aura of divinity that surrounded the young Dionysos despite the clever disguise he had adopted, and who fought with his former comrades to defend the Stranger God from assault. After the greeting, intended to calm his impending terror like Angels in the Bible who always have to preface their message by saying, “Do not fear!”, Dionysos drops the mask and provides a full revelation of his divinity. The language makes the connection even more explicit in the Greek:

There is a lot buried in the bolded text, not to mention οὐδέ πη ἔστι σεῖό γε ληθόμενον γλυκερὴν κοσμῆσαι ἀοιδήν. “He who forgets you can in no wise order sweet song.” Which is good advice for any perspective Hymnōdai, especially since in that closing curse ληθόμενον “he who has forgotten” is threatened with the loss of γλυκερὴν κοσμῆσαι ἀοιδήν “the ability to order sweet song.” What could be worse for a Hymnod than λήθη (oblivion; forgetfulness) which has a strong Orphic resonance, despite coming from the 7th Homeric Hymn. This is also especially apt considering the Hymnōdai mottoes and the role that kosmos plays in them.

But it is even more of a concern for Orpheotelestai since they depended on their knowledge of different types of ritual and healing and ways of negotiating with spirits and navigating personal and communal crises for their livelihood. Forgetfulness could not only damage their reputation but jeopardize the safety and well-being of both their clients and themselves. (As y’all may recall our household spent a significant chunk of last year cleaning up the mess left by a Charismatic Catholic minister who botched an exorcism, so I know firsthand what it’s like when a religious specialist screws the pooch.)

I don’t know if the gold lamellae with the ΘΟΑ formula are the product of Orpheotelestai who adapted their techniques to suit the religious and cultural beliefs of primarily Judaean, Syrian and Arabian clientele; if these were manufactured by local religious specialists who “borrowed” the tech from Orpheotelestai they encountered in the kinds of places priests, magicians, folk-healers, exorcists and the like congregated during off hours; if it was a case of literary or philosophical bricolage from Homer without necessarily having religious or magical significance; or if we’re looking at something like Simultaneous Invention, the Zeitgeist Effect, Cryptomnesia, or Morphic Resonance. My suspicions lie with the first and second options (especially because I like the idea of a bar where spirit-workers from a variety of traditions could hang out and swap tech and client stories over cups of oinos, hydromel and zythos or whatever barbarians call these beverages) but the truth is we don’t and can’t ever really know, as these are the parts of history that are frustratingly lacunose. Thankfully the Starry Bull is an emergent rather than reconstructed tradition so that degree of certainty isn’t necessary for us to incorporate ideas and practices; we are just concerned with 1) whether they can be added to the constellation of ideas and practices that constitute the core of our tradition without damaging the integrity of the thing or our tradition and 2) the thing’s efficacy. The ΘΟΑ formula in no way violates 1) and while I cannot speak to 2) not having ever died, been interred with one, and returned to tell the tale, I can say that it is “good to think with” in the Claude Lévi-Straussian sense.

Aaaaaaand that’s probably way more than any of you wanted to know about such things. The take away is that the Orpheotelestai now have their own motto, which is:

τὰ δ᾽ ἄλλα πάντα ὁδός· θαρρῶ γὰρ εἰδὼς τὸν κτίσαντα αὐτήν.
Ta d’ alla panta hodos; tharrō gar eidōs ton ktisanta autēn.
“All else is the road; I take courage, knowing the one who established it.”