Death and what comes after

One of the things that distinguishes the thiasos of the Starry Bull from other Dionysian groups is our strong chthonic and eschatological focus.

Consequently, I’ve posted about the topic quite a bit. Some of the most important being:

* Death, for the Orphics, was like a really intense drug trip
* Chthonic Dionysos and the Saints of the True Vine
* the dead are with us
* Throw wide the doors, ye profane ones!
* Son of Semele or son of Persephone?
* Death is a great erotic adventure

One of our thiasos members wrote a really great piece exploring her own thoughts and questions on death and what comes after, which you can read here. And do read it, as it provides some necessary context for what follows. (You should probably also read the above links, as I indirectly allude to a lot of what’s in them.) They then asked for my thoughts on the subject. As today is the Feast of the Dionysian Martyrs (and I’ve actually been asked similar questions before) I felt it appropriate to share my response with folks here.

The thing to always keep in mind with the Orphics is that they weren’t one homogenous group – you’ve basically got a bunch of competing itinerant religious specialists so by necessity their views differed from each other, since one way you can get an edge on the competition is by claiming to have a better and more refined understanding of things than everyone else. A number of Orphics, related groups like the Pythagoreans and figures such as Pindar, Empedokles and Pherekydes believed in metempsychosis or reincarnation. This has given rise to the erroneous notion that all Orphics held this view, which is both inaccurate and blinds us to what they were actually trying to get at with their cryptic phrases – but that’s neither here nor there.

My personal belief is that our being dissolves into its constituent parts upon death – the physical body decays and returns to the earth, the animating spirit joins this primordial soup and gets recycled into new bodies and the soul, bearing the unique imprint of our memories and ego-consciousness is either preserved or dissolves into nothingness, depending on how we handle the underworld trials. Recollections of past lives are a result of the spirit not getting boiled down thoroughly enough before being poured into the next body, sometimes with contagion from other spirits, (This is why multiple people can have “memories” of the same life so that you can end up with a room full of folks who all remember being Kleopatra, Napoleon and Jesus, and also why there are currently more people alive than have previously walked the earth combined.)

The Starry Bull tradition does not rest on an assumption of reincarnation, but on the other hand it doesn’t reject it either. It’s sort of like the Buddhist approach to gods – a matter of indifference, since the focus of the system is on something else. In our case, liberation which means the preservation of memory, power and agency in the afterlife so that we may dwell in the presence of our gods. Initiation does not automatically confer that status on the individual – what it does is give you an experience of death so that when you face the real thing you’re not caught by surprise. “Oh shit, I’ve been here before. I recognize the landscape. I know which way to go. I recall what to say to the sentries.” That’s why the gold lamellae all concern themselves with the same event. That’s just a tiny bit of what happens to us over there – and they often allude to a great deal more – but it’s pivotal because it concerns the choice between drinking from the waters of Forgetfulness or Memory. There’s a long, wearying journey that precedes that and a long way to go after that with all manner of things to overcome before reaching one’s destination.

But something to keep in mind – not everyone who’s over there drinks from Forgetfulness and not everyone has the same destination in mind. For that matter, there’s nothing that requires you to stay in that place once you’ve reached your destination. Indeed, Dionysos is not Haides – he’s a prince of the realm with his own dominion, not the ruler of the whole land of the dead. Meaning that he can – and does – come and go as he pleases. And so do his dead. His dead are described as feasting and hunting heroes – meaning that there’s more to their posthumous fate than just chilling out and getting drunk for eternity. Indeed a large part of the tradition centers on his role as leader of the Furious Host, and where do they hunt? Not there, but here. And no doubt other places as well, which is how he’s attracted so many strange groups of spirits about him such as the weird-ass Clowns and the things that are like Titans and Fairies and Goblins.

A couple things follow from that – first, that his dead are capable of traveling about and secondly if they can feast and hunt they can do plenty of other things too. That’s kind of the whole point – retaining agency. You see, the ability to move about isn’t the special prerogative that Dionysos won for his dead through his bargain with Haides. Other dead people can do it too, otherwise why would the Orpheotelestai be called in to help folks get right with their dead and atone for ancestral guilt? That kind of presupposes contact between the living and the dead here in this world. Some of them, however, get stuck – stuck in a loop of continuously living out terrible memories, stuck in this place as ghosts. His dead are fully preserved, which makes it easier for them to find their way back to him, which is part of the bargain he struck with Haides. So there’s nothing precluding you from visiting with your family or going on walkabout through the various realms – it’s just a hell of a lot easier to do so as one of his dead. Dionysos is the wandering god, after all, he totally gets that lust for travel and new experiences. Also, he harrowed hell to retrieve the soul of his mother. He made sure that his initiates would be with him for all time. Why would he then turn around and want you to be cut off and alienated from those you love?

And perhaps most importantly we must remember that the banquet of eternity is both an actual thing and a metaphor for being (re)united with him. Over and over again in Southern Italy you find the symbolism of and the experience expressed as marriage to Dionysos as well as dissolving into the oceanic bliss of wine. Our language isn’t really complex enough to convey what this is like and so we settle for something that conveys a small portion of it. Feasting. Marriage. Drowning in joy. It exists on multiple levels simultaneously and also transcends them. It is all those things and so very much more.