Ονομα Βάκχος
“I am Bakchos.”

893
800 + 90 + 3
8/93

2 = Beta
1 = Alpha
20 = Kappa
600 = Chi
70 = Omicron
200 = Sigma

The Etruscan trembled before the Stranger, saying “Who are you? How are you called?”

And he replied:

Who I am is a mystery, but how I am called is easy enough to discern.

Begin with the bountiful dyad, the union of male and female.
And add another one in the shape of a bull’s head or tripod.
Kindly, then, place ten and ten more rods in the bundle.
CHoicest hekatombs offer six times over, giving back to the givers.
Of gleaming honey-wine seven measures should be poured out, ten times.
See the sacrificial blade, that resembles the number two hundred.

Put these all together and you have 893, the value of my name.

PALACE OF EXILE
by Jim Morrison

For seven years I dwelt in the loose palace of exile
Playing strange games with the girls of the island
Now I have come again to the land of the fair
And the strong, and the wise

Brothers and sisters of the pale forest, children of night
Who among you will run with the hunt?

Now night arrives with her purple legion
Retire now to your tents and to your dreams
Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth
I want to be ready

If a fawn-skin can be so polyvalent, why assume that an earthquake or a viral pandemic can mean just one thing and one thing only?

The stories we share, and what we believe about them, matter.

Be careful, folks. The China virus isn’t the only one circulating.

While I dig the cosmic connotations the Orphics gave the nebris, it can mean many different things to different people.

For instance, it can be a symbol of personal liberation:

Edith and I are Maenads now with a “longing for the hills & ecstasy.” Let Frances expect to see me at the midland station with cone-pointed thyrsos & fawn-skin. Tell him I shall walk to Lindelhurst in this array. He need not think of hiding my originality in a fly! (Katherine Harris Bradley to the family of Frances Brooks in a letter dated 1882)

Of jubilant procession:

That Osiris is identical with Dionysos who could more fittingly know than yourself, Klea? For you lead the Thyiadic dances at Delphi and have been consecrated by your father and mother in the holy rites of Osiris. If, however, for the benefit of others it is needful to adduce proofs of this identity, let us leave undisturbed what may not be told, but the public ceremonies which the priests perform in the burial of the Apis, when they convey his body on an improvised bier, do not in any way come short of a Bacchic procession; for they fasten skins of fawns about themselves, and carry Bacchic wands and indulge in shoutings and movements exactly as do those who are under the spell of the Dionysiac ecstasies. (Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 35)

Or of destructive transformation:

On the road from Megara there is a spring on the right, and a little farther on a rock. It is called the bed of Aktaion, for it is said that he slept thereon when weary with hunting, and that into this spring he looked while Artemis was bathing with her nymphs. Stesichoros of Himera says that the Goddess cast a deer-skin round Aktaion to make sure that his hounds would kill him, so as to prevent his taking Semele to wife. (Pausanias, Description Greece 9.2.3)

The bit from Stesichoros is interesting, and not just for the crime he ascribes to Pentheus’ cousin Aktaion. (I’ll let that one settle in for a moment.) 

Himera is not far from Syracuse and Tyndaris, which held interesting celebrations for the Huntress, according to the Anonymous Life of Theokritos 1b:

Others says that bucolic poetry was first performed at Tyndaris in Sicily. When Orestes took the image of Artemis away from Tauris in Scythia, he received an oracle, that he should wash himself in seven rivers flowing from one source. Therefore Orestes went to Rhegium in Italy, and washed away the curse in the so-called “separated” rivers. Then he crossed over to Tyndaris in Sicily, where the inhabitants sang their local songs in honour of the Goddess, and this was the origin of the tradition. They say that when the men sang, they prepared a loaf with many images of wild animals on it, a pouch full of all kinds of seeds, and wine in a goatskin, to pour out as an offering for those they met. They wore a garland, with the antlers of a deer on their head, and a staff in their hands. The victor in the contest received the loaf of the man he had vanquished; and the victor remained in the city of Syracuse, while the losers went out to the surrounding villages to collect food for themselves. They sang songs full of fun and laughter, and added the following propitious words:

Receive good fortune,
Receive good health,
Which we bring from the Goddess,
Which she has commanded.

 

Here’s a fun site while you are socially isolating:

https://earthquaketrack.com/

Did you know that there have been:

136 earthquakes in the past 24 hours
1,027 earthquakes in the past 7 days
4,802 earthquakes in the past 30 days
63,829 earthquakes in the past 365 days

Neat!

Last night I went out for a cigarette and there was a deer in our front yard. Its beautiful, stupid eyes met mine for a moment and then it blithely resumed munching leaves until I said, “My, you’d make a lovely nebris.” Then it trotted off, feigning indifference. The street was empty and misty and otherworldly as I watched it head down towards the old oak near the school, site of so many past rituals. I gazed heavenward until I spotted the barest sliver of the Moon, surrounded by a flickering chorus of stars dancing in the dark.

Now I’m listening to Kamienie by Modlitwa and wondering what the month holds in store for us. 

Oppian, Cynergetica 4.354‑424
Leopards are overcome also by the gifts of Dionysos, when crafty hunters pour for them the crafty draught, shunning not the anger of holy Dionysos. Leopards are now a race of wild beasts, but aforetime they were not fierce wild beasts but bright-eyed women, wine-drinking, carriers of the vine branch, celebrators of the triennial festival, flower-crowned, nurses of frenzied Bacchus who rouses the dance.

For Ino, scion of Agenor, reared the infant Bacchus and first gave her breast to the son of Zeus, and Autonoe likewise and Agave joined in nursing him, but not in the baleful halls of Athamas, but on the mountain which at that time men called by the name of the Thigh (Μηρός). For greatly fearing the mighty spouse of Zeus and dreading the tyrant Pentheus, son of Echion, they laid the holy child in a coffer of pine and covered it with fawn-skins and wreathed it with clusters of the vine, in a grotto where round the child they danced the mystic dance and beat drums and clashed cymbals in their hands, to veil the cries of the infant. It was around that hidden ark that they first showed forth their mysteries, and with them the Aonian women secretly took paint rites. And they arrayed a gathering of their faithful companions to journey from that mountain out of the Boeotian land. For now, now was it fated that a land, which before was wild, should cultivate the vine at the instance of Dionysos who delivers from sorrow. Then the holy choir took up secret coffer and wreathed it and set it on the back of an ass.

And they came unto the shores of the Euripus, where they found a seafaring old man with his sons, and all together they besought the fishermen that they might cross the water in their boats. Then the old man had compassion on them and received on board the holy women. And lo! on the benches of his boat flowered the lush bindweed and blooming vine and ivy wreathed the stern. Now would the fishermen, cowering in God-sent terror, have dived into the sea, but ere that the boat came to land. And to Euboea the women came, carrying the God, and to the abode of Aristaeus, who dwelt in a cave on the top of a mountain at Caryae and who instructed the life of country-dwelling men in countless things; he was the first to establish a flock of sheep; he first pressed the fruit of the oily wild olive, first curdled milk with rennet, and brought the gentle bees from the oak and shut them up in hives. He at that time received the infant Dionysos from coffer of Ino and reared him in his cave and nursed him with the help of the Dryads and the Nymphs that have the bees in their keeping and the maidens of Euboea and the Aonian women.

And, when Dionysos was now come to boyhood, he played with the other children; he would cut a fennel stalk and smite the hard rocks, and from their wounds they poured for the God sweet liquor. Otherwhiles he rent rams, skins and all, and clove them piecemeal and cast the dead bodies on the ground; and again with his hands he neatly put the limbs together, and immediately they were alive and browsed on the green pasture. And now he was attended by holy companies, and over all the earth were spread the gifts of Dionysos, son of Thyone, and everywhere he went about showing his excellence to men.

Late and at last he set foot in Thebes, and all the daughters of Cadmus am to meet the son of fire. But rash Pentheus bound the hands of Dionysos that should not be bound and threatened with his own murderous hands to rend the God. He had not regard unto the white hair of Tyrian Cadmus nor to Agave grovelling at his feet, but called to his ill-fated companions to hale away the God — to hale him away and shut him up — and he drave away the choir of women. Now the guards of Pentheus thought to carry away Bromius in bonds of iron, and so thought the other Cadmeans; but the bonds touched not the God. And the heart of the women worshippers was chilled, and they cast on the ground all the garlands for and the holy emblems of their hands, and the cheeks of all the worshippers of Bromius flowed with tears. And straightway they cried: “Io! blessed one, O Dionysos, kindle thou the flaming lightning of thy faith and shake the earth and give us speedy vengeance on the evil tyrant. And, O son of fire, make Pentheus a bull upon the hills, make Pentheus of evil name a bull and make us ravenous wild beasts, armed with deadly claws, that, O Dionysos, we may rend him in our mouths.” So spake they praying and the lord of Nysa speedily hearkened to their prayer. Pentheus he made a bull of deadly eye and arched his neck and made the horns spring from his forehead. But to the women he gave the grey eyes of a wild beast and armed their jaws and on their backs put a spotted hide like that of fawns and made them a savage race. And, by the devising of the God having changed their fair flesh, in the form of Leopards they rent Pentheus among the rocks. Such things let us sing, such things let us believe in our hearts!

According to the Bakcheion calendar today is the Noumenia of the month Νεβρίς (Nebris) which is named after the sacred cape or sash of fur worn by Dionysos and his frenzied devotees. Most often this came from young deer who were hunted during savage nocturnal rites:

He’s welcome in the mountains,
when he sinks down to the ground,
after the running dance,
wrapped in holy deerskin,
hunting the blood of the slain beast,
devouring its raw flesh with joy,
rushing off into the mountains,
in Phrygia, in Lydia,
leading the dance—
Bromios—Evoë!
(Euripides, The Bakchai 172-180)

But we also find them wearing the pelts of goats, leopards, foxes and other animals belonging to the God’s menagerie. The last of these is called a bassaris rather than nebris and it tended to include the head as well as just the skin; those who wore it were called Bassarai, a particular expression of Mainadism originating in Makedonia and Thrake though during the Hellenistic period it spread to Egypt and Asia Minor too.

To put on the nebris is to enter the domain of Dionysos, marking one off as belonging to his Retinue at least for the duration of the revels. Thus we find even divinities like Pan, Kybele, Herakles, Artemis and various Nymphs and River-Gods depicted wearing it when their more Bacchic aspects are being emphasized.

Perhaps the most dramatic representation of how this simple change of clothing can affect an alteration of consciousness is to be found in Euripides’ The Bakchai, where the adversarial Pentheus finally succumbs to the seductive force of Dionysos and allows the God to dress him up in his regalia.

This regalia was given added significance by the Orphics, as Macrobius notes in  Saturnalia 1.18:

In the line, “The sun, which men also call by name Dionysos,” Orpheus manifestly declares that Liber is the Sun. And in riddling verse he also says, “One Zeus, one Hades, one Helios, one Dionysos.” And concerning the ornaments and vestments worn by Liber at the ceremonies performed in his honor, Orpheus says:

Let the worshiper first throw around him a crimson robe,
like flowing rays resembling fire.
Moreover from above the broad all-variegated skin of a wild fawn
thickly spotted should hang down from the right shoulder,
a representation of the wondrously-wrought stars
and of the vault of heaven.
And then over the fawn-skin a golden belt should be thrown,
all-gleaming to wear around the breast a mighty sign
that immediately from the end of the earth
the Beaming-one springing up
darts his golden rays on the flowing of ocean.

Which is appropriate as we shall be entering the Gold Season on April 1st.

From the Mercury News: coronavirus is bringing a plague of dangerous doomsday predictions.

From Inquisitr: two asteroids nearly collided with our planet today, one coming within 437,100 miles of us.

From The Charlotte Observer: five earthquakes rattle the Carolinas and Tennessee.

From The Guardian: Croatian capital Zagreb hit by its biggest quake in 140 years. 

From Yahoo!Lifestyle: coronavirus has encouraged a quarter of adults to talk to neighbours for first time. 

From the Niagara Gazette: Harvey Weinstein put in isolation after “contracting virus” – totes not planning to kill self early next week. ($20 says the editor already has the headline prepared)

And finally, here’s some footage of the nearly 500 lions President Putin released to keep the Russian streets empty during the coronavirus quarantine.

That last one was fake news by the way, but it was hard to tell because everything’s gotten so fucking crazy, right? 

If, like me, you have been thinking “what this situation really needs is the eruption of a supervolcano,” then we may not have long to wait — according to National Geographic a chunk of Yellowstone the size of Chicago has begun ‘pulsing.’

Of course that’s nothing compared to the plight of America’s celebrities, confined to their mansions without crowds of adoring fans to feed their voracious egos. Some of them are clearly starting to crack from the pressure.

I bet all those refugees caught up in the border conflict between Greece and Turkey feel real bad for them – I mean, when they’re not dodging tear gas and lasers (yes, actual lasers) that is.

But the true victim of the coronavirus isn’t celebrities or immigrants, nor even the 800 Italians a day who are dying from it – it’s … feminism. Mind you this isn’t someone upset over Ohio using the crisis to curtail access to abortion; no, they feel that being asked to pitch in with household chores and childcare during the apocalypse is “oppressive.” Or some shit – I had to rage-quit the article a couple paragraphs in so I’m not entirely sure.   

Anywho … when is Old Faithful gonna blow its top again? Cause I’m thinking it’s well past time.

Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick … 

Relevant to the last post, here are some selections from Robert Lima’s Stages of Evil: Occultism in Western Theater and Drama on the Northern roots of Harlequin. 

The ancestral lineage of Arlecchino is both ancient and exotic. There are two principal veins in his bloodline, the first being the Central and Northern European barbaric culture, the second the Classical tradition of the Mediterranean. Each contributed disparate elements to the evolution of the complex figure that ultimately established itself in the forefront of the commedia dell’arte scenarios.

Belief in nature deities in pagan times often became transformed in the Christian era. There are numerous instances in which such gods and goddesses became transmogrified, being given the role of purveyors of evil in the new faith. Among these is the figure that has come to be known as Harlequin.

The oldest known references that relate to Arlecchino’s barbaric lineage clearly show his ancestors to be daemonic. The Historiae ecclesiasticae libri XIII, a Norman manuscript by Ordericus Vitalis (1075-1143?), is the earliest extant written reference in this context. The Anglo-Norman monk who is its author narrates a legend – perhaps based on a real-life incident – centering on a supernatural encounter experienced by a certain Gauchelin, a French monk, when he was returning late at night to his abode in Bonneval, near Chartres. The text refers to his being accosted by a hellish band: “Haec sine dubio familia Herlichini est” (3.376). Clearly, the monk in the narrative had been beset by the “family of Herlichin” a “spectral host of relentless demons who marauded the countryside on certain winter nights, at the same time of year as the Carnival celebrations, rampaging through forests and valleys, destroying everything in their path” (Husband, 152-53). Gauchelin recognizes his assailants as the nefarious group that had come to be known among the populace as the Wild Horde, infamous beings out of a very widespread European folkloric tradition. The procession of damned souls is led by a gigantic figure with a club whose proper name is given as “Hellekins.” This will prove to be the earliest-known written version of the name that would ultimately become Arlecchino.

The fact that this episode, narrated in the twelfth century, is so well delineated indicated that the belief in the Wild Horde and its daemonic leader had currency much earlier. Ordericus Vitalis’s account is surely not an isolated one, only the earliest found to date. It is followed by others, narratives that show how deeply embedded was the belief in the Wild Horde and its leader in the imagination of the Middle Ages, particularly in France.

The continuity of the topos can be seen in the thirteenth century, which provides further folkloric and literary references to Hellekin and his cohorts in the works of several church and secular authorities. For one, Wilhelm of Auvergne, bishop of Paris at his death in 1248, verifies the wide range of the belief in the daemonic figures when he refers to the tradition in Spain in his Tractatus de universo: “De equitibus vero nocturnis qui vulgari gallicano ‘Hellequin’ et vulgari hispanico ‘exercitus antiquus’ vocantur, nondum tibi satisfeci, quia nondum declarare intend qui sint; nectamen certum est eos malignos spiritus esse” (par. 2. Chap. 12). That the folkloric figure crossed over into literature proper is also evident in the same century. The Norman poet Bourdet narrates in the verse Lay de Luque la Maudite the tale of a lascivious old witch of Rouen who on her deathbed calls on “Hellequin” to marry her. In response, the daemon leads three thousand of his hellish kin to the wedding feast and, ultimately, takes her soul into his realm, hell. In this text, as elsewhere, Hellequin has an obvious appeal as a sexual being to a dying woman; in being tied to the lure of death, he also represents the daemon-lover, which is what Hades is in the Persephone myth.

Another telling identification of Arlecchino with the daemonic in the thirteenth century is found in Le jeu de la feuillée (Play of the Bower) ascribed to Adam de la Halle, in which “Herlequin”, the ruler of the underworld, seeks to woo the fairy Morgue through the agency of the daemon Crokesot (Croquesot in later texts) rather than in person. Unfortunately, Harlequin himself does not appear onstage, choosing to remain invisibly ensconced in his nether kingdom.

The ascendant of the medieval French daemon evolved out of Norse and Teutonic mythological beings who came to be known in Germany and adjacent areas as the “Teufel Herlekin” or Hellekin (i.e. “Kin of Hel”), Hel or Hela being the goddess of the Norse underworld. As Hel’s consort Ellerkonge (variant Elverkonge) was the male deity of the sacred alder (elder) tree and of the land of the dead. The mistranslation of the Danish Ellerkonge gave Erlkönig, king of the elves in a Germanic saga. As Erl King, yet another variant, he was a German and Scandinavian spirit or personified natural power akin to Odin who led a band of ghostly riders across the night sky. In Middle English he is Herleking, while King Herla is the name of another mythical manifestation of the deity in England.

Herlekin is the probable source of Herne the Hunter, the phallic horned god variously known in the British Isles under such names as the Green Man, Jack-in-the-Green, Robin-of-the-Wood, Robin Goodfellow and Robin Hood. These are all manifestations of the King of the May, the ancient fertility deity whose phallus became the symbolic maypole featured in May Day celebrations held throughout Europe to welcome the rebirth (and impregnation) of Mother Earth in spring. The magical season of nature’s fecundity was emulated in rituals of sympathetic magic that culminated in sexual coupling.

Such fertility figures in the British Isles and on the Continent derive from a very early, perhaps Paleolithic, being known as the Wild Man, a larger-than-life, often gigantic creature covered in hair, fur, lichen, twigs or leaves whose primal identity was tied to woodlands, symbolized by the uprooted tree he carried, usually over his shoulder or in his hand. Later, in Carnival celebrations, in the wedding-night pandemonium called a charivari (chivaree), and in rites known as the Wild Man Hunt, a massive studded club was often substituted for the traditional tree. Paraphrasing Chrétien de Troyes, Husband describes this elemental being as “an ogrish wild man, black like a Moor, large and hideous, sitting on a tree stump and holding a large club in his hand” while Bernheimer cites the anonymous medieval French Renaud de Montaubon for its description of such marginal beings as noir et velu com ours enchainé (“black and hairy like a chained bear”).

In one of the strange symbioses that sometimes occur in folklore, the Wild Man came to be associated with mythological beings and himself was held to be daemonic. One of the identities of the savage is Orcus (literally, Wild Man), a telluric deity out of the Gallo-Roman era who led the processions of the dead and who, as a daemon of death, had an association with Pluto or Hades, the lord of the underworld in classical mythology. In the Tyrolean Virginal the epic gives the variant Orkise as the name of a cannibalistic hunter in the form of an ogre. The functions of Orcus as leader of the Wild Horde came to be preempted by the daemon Hellekin, and Herlequin or Harlequin in medieval France. Similarly in the second vein, the complex world of classical and Eastern mythologies, there are several figures who are clearly antecedents of Arlecchino’s earliest relative, the Wild Man.

A lot of folks who are working from home during the present pandemic have been complaining on social media about the increased amount of time they’re being forced to spend with loved ones and family. 

Personally, I’ve enjoyed it.

Yesterday, for instance, our household spent the morning doing light ecstatic work while listening to songs about the Wild Hunt and Crossroads Spirits and intermittently having conversations on the Odinic traits of Harlequin, the various forms of Loki, Northern European and Asiatic Bear-cults, Mumming and how we want to do more of it, the overlap and differences between Fairies and the Dead, how Orphism has a World-Tree though conventional Greco-Roman religion does not, the important role that ‘zines played in the development of contemporary Heathenry and Hellenismos back in the early ’80s and ’90s and how this history is in danger of being lost, as well as our plans for the next couple festivals on our respective calendars.  

The key is finding the right sort of people to socially isolate with.