It’s time to get serious about the Dionysos ritual we’ll be doing off-site Friday evening during the Polytheist Leadership Conference. If you want in drop me a line so I can start putting stuff together. Going to devise a very different ritual if it’s just five or six people versus twenty. And though the focus of this will be the Dionysos Eubouleos who is venerated within the thiasos of the Starry Bull the ritual will be open to anyone who wants to participate. Provided they meet with my approval, which is one reason we’re doing this offsite. It’s not a good time to be an overly curious stranger when Bakchai are areveling.
It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, “more like deer than human being.” To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn. (Donna Tartt, The Secret History)
Tagged: dionysos, polytheist leadership conference, thiasos of the starry bull
