They discuss the blending of mythology with esoteric and theosophical inquiries, noting that mythology acts as a symbolic language similar to dreams. The conversation delves into the influence of Dionysian myths, exploring the god Dionysus's ancient narratives and their transformation over time, including connections to Orphism and Christianity. They highlight the portrayal of Dionysus as embodying duality and compare this with other deities like Sekhmet from Egypt, illustrating a recurring theme of the life force and spiritual transcendence across cultures. The conversation touches on the presence of Dionysian elements in modern culture and other Abrahamic religions, revealing a shared heritage often overlooked in contemporary understanding. The dialogue concludes with reflections on the enduring relevance of these myths and their impact on personal and cultural consciousness.
Transcript:
So I saw a couple of your works, including "American Metaphysical," which is a very big book. I read a couple of chapters, but then I realized you are not necessarily interested in American theosophical/esoteric literature; you are also an expert in mythology. Personally, let me tell you a little bit about my background. I came from Bangladesh, to be specific, and in Bangladesh, we have a different kind of mythology. In our schools and colleges, we almost never heard of Greek mythology—very little—because we have our own rich mythology, like Hindu mythology, Buddhist mythology, etc.
As I was growing up and came to study, I realized that even philosophy, when you go beyond it, the only thing that remains is mythology because it is possibly a thousand, maybe 1500 years older than the earliest philosophy.
This gave me a little bit of respect for the old times when people told the stories of mythology by the same individuals who later gave us philosophy.
So it's the same story—not just a random fairy tale. Mythology has some real value. So, let's talk about mythology: why do you explore it as part of your esoteric and theosophical inquiry? Are they connected somehow?
I've always been very interested in mythology—even as a child. Any kind of mythology that I came across—Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Hindu, Native American—always fascinated me because it's a language of symbols, much like dreams. It can have multiple meanings in ways that dogma usually doesn’t, although it sometimes does as well. As you mentioned, mythology also borders on fairy tale and what would later be known as the unconscious once Freud named it. It provides a record of human experience and distills wisdom into symbolic language. So, Manly Hall was very interested in that, and I definitely caught that from him—his interpretations and his eagerness and excitement about mythology and the wisdom of the ancients, whom he believed were no less intelligent than we are. In fact, he felt they may have had a greater grasp on certain aspects of life because they weren’t as deeply immersed in materialism and politics.
Okay, so we are not strangers. Many wise people have suggested that mythology is important. My background is strictly academic; I do podcasts just for my passion. I’m a physician by training, practicing here, and I also have a PhD in neuroscience.
When I studied neuroscience, everyone was interested in learning and memory—that’s the core of neuroscience: how do we know what we know, and how do we remember? Even when you go to the cellular level, it remains a mystery or a black box, like qualia, you know?
Then I realized that the problem I’m trying to solve or learn about isn’t solvable by strict science because by the time you go to the cellular or molecular level, there is still a black box.
That is what we call memory and remembrance, and I know you have a particular understanding of remembrance in relation to Dionysus and Greek mythology. They’re trying to tell you a story captured from the unconscious, so it’s not a voluntary declaration of memory; rather, it’s more of a dream quality of memory. That doesn’t mean it’s totally invalid.
So, that was my main interest.
Let’s talk about that because I think the connections and transformations that occur in the worship of Dionysus and its connection to Pythagoras, potentially. Then when you’re talking about memory, and you get into the reform of the Dionysian religion as Orphism, probably orchestrated by the Pythagoreans, you delve deeply into this idea of memory and the essence of spiritual evolution as recovering the memory of who you are—of what you really are. Yet this is so different from how the religion originated. It’s obviously an attempt to civilize, and I think it’s also an attempt to develop a civic religion as opposed to a rural religion. Dionysus is very interesting because he’s always considered an outsider. He came from somewhere else, and we have stories in Greece where he’s said to be from India. That’s the most common story. We have stories saying he’s from the Middle East. We have stories that he was Phoenician, that he was Thracian in northern Greece, which wasn’t even considered a part of Greek culture by most of the Peloponnese. So, you’ve got a god who may have come from somewhere else but who established a presence in Greece as early as any other god. Very early—like 1600 BC—we're seeing indications of that. By 700 BC, he was very well established as a religion and as a presence. And by 600 BC, we have this incredible moment where the Athenians decided to bring Dionysus into their pantheon of gods and create this temple that includes a theater. They celebrated at first only tragedies but later included comedies in this theater as part of the celebration for Dionysus.
Now, of course, you have the incredible play by Euripides, "The Bacchae," where he gives you this disturbing yet evocative portrait that is not Greek in a way. Briefly, for your listeners and viewers, we have a king named Pentheus, who is a model of manly virtue. He’s a Greek male Olympian who wants to be a hero; he’s a soldier, a strong politician, and he runs his country with an iron fist. All of a sudden, the women in his country go kind of crazy—they begin disappearing and going up into the mountains. They’re celebrating this god, Dionysus, who apparently is going to show up in town any day.
So, Pentheus sees a guy walk into town, an effeminate young male with an entourage, and he’s carrying a pine cone on a fennel stalk, which is obviously a phallic symbol. He’s surrounded by, to Pentheus, the dregs of society—people who are all about intoxication and sex. It’s like a 1960s band coming through town or something. Pentheus throws him in jail; he doesn’t want this influence on his city. This person, whom Pentheus says is a priest of the god but who declares himself to be the god yet refers to the god in the third person at times, says to Pentheus, “You’re going to regret this because the god will show himself; he will show his power.” What happens is there’s an earthquake that knocks down the jail that Dionysus is imprisoned in. Well, Pentheus is furious at this alleged show of divine power and is very curious about what the women are doing. He seems to be in shock even though the Greeks didn’t really have that concept at the time because he starts talking to the escaped Dionysus. He asks, “What are the women doing up there?” Dionysus replies, “They’re celebrating my rites.” “But what do they do?” Pentheus asks. Dionysus says, “Well, would you like to know? Would you like to see?” Pentheus responds, “Well, yes, of course I’d love to see. Can we go see?” Dionysus says, “Well, not dressed like that. They’ll kill you if they see a man invading their sacred space in their ritual. But if you dress up as a woman, then you can sneak in there.”
So this really masculine warrior has Dionysus dress him in a wig, and while it’s in a way funny, even though it’s a tragedy, Euripides has him saying, “Does this look good? Do I look fat?” The female side kind of comes out of this manly king. The tragedy is completed when Pentheus goes and spies on the women, and then Dionysus allows him to be seen and caught, and his own mother rips him apart, thinking he’s an animal in her frenzy and believing they’ve been attacked by an animal—which is a statement about how she feels about this man who dressed up as a woman to invade the rites of the women, even if it’s her own son. This is a terrible tragedy for her when she comes to her senses. Euripides tells us this is why we must respect Dionysus—in a way, it’s like saying we must respect the irrational; we must respect our drive for ecstasy, our drive for experiencing material joys because if we don’t, it drives us crazy.
Exactly. So when he arrives in the town, he introduces himself, saying, “I already conquered and earned the adoration and respect and veneration from all over the old world—like Arabia, Phoenicia, Thrace, even India. They already know me. I came here to introduce myself because you have forgotten me.”
Exactly.
Right. That was very telling. Regarding this, you just mentioned that our emotions and passions cannot be ignored by being manly men.
Exactly. This religion was somewhat frightening to the Greeks because in some of the cults, you would rip apart an animal. That was the sacrifice, and you literally had to rip a living animal apart, and they would eat the raw flesh. Sometimes there were bull slaughters, and they would bathe in the blood. To the Greeks, who were talking about Zeus and the law of hospitality, they were a little taken aback by what was going on here among the rural people. Women had a lot of power because of the Maenads. The Maenads were normal Greek women, but they were driven mad by Dionysus, and they would wander in the hills. Men were afraid of them because they were dangerous opponents. They were said to have killed Orpheus.
What happens is very interesting because, of course, Dionysus is constantly reinvented. The Romans make him into Alexander. They say that he went to India and conquered India and gave India laws. It’s clear they’re mythologizing Alexander and putting him on top of this Dionysian mythology, probably because of the Pythagoreans, although academics are still arguing about this. There are good points for and against, but it makes a lot of sense that Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans had this idea: can we take the Dionysian religion and transform it into a civilizing force? How do you do this? It seems impossible. How would you take such a bloody, wild, all-music-filled ritual where people are getting drunk? They always portray him with a large erection, and it goes against the Greek concept of how one should behave as a warrior and how people should comport themselves within the city-state. How do you turn this into a force for civilization? This is the myth of Orpheus.
Now, Orpheus also appears pretty early, around the same time we see signs of Dionysus, and this has led people like Madame Blavatsky, for example, to suggest that Orpheus was indeed Hindu. She even said she thought his name came from a Greek word for river mud because he had dark skin.
I don’t know if that’s really true; there are many potential origins for his name. By the way, there are many Orpheus figures—the myth is a conglomerate of them. But in its essence, the story goes like this: someone came along—Orpheus—who naturally possessed this power of music; being the son of a Muse, they would say he could move even the gods with his music. He could educate. When he was on the Argo, you know, the first boat that went around for the Greeks, they said they left temples everywhere. He wrote the liturgies for these temples. He was said to learn what people worshiped in the area, then he would build an altar and write songs for them, and this would become the liturgy of a new religion. He was said to be so wonderful with his music, for example, that the sirens were silenced by him, and so the sailors were not drawn to their destruction when the sirens sang. He supposedly wrote this set of hymns. He gathered all the gods together because, at that time, they were all considered very separate. Some gods were in more than one city, but most gods specialized in one city. All of a sudden, he gathered up all the Greek gods, and they were part of one family—the Olympian family—and we sang hymns to them. Homer, of course, did the same thing with the Iliad and the Odyssey and with the Homeric hymns, gathering up gods from all the different cities and rural areas and making them into one kind of bureaucracy of gods that could represent a more civilized approach to worship.
Orpheus instituted some big rule changes. First, Orpheus says we do not kill for sacrifice; we don’t eat meat at all because we believe in reincarnation. If reincarnation is true and you kill an animal, you might be killing someone who is dear to you—even your own mother—something you still hear in Buddhism.
So now we’re not eating meat and we’re not sacrificing animals. We’re going to use milk, flowers, and honey. Those are the gifts we give to the gods. He even said, “What gods would be pleased by such a thing? By the slaughter of animals.” It’s ridiculous. He said, “If you really want to please the gods, live a pure life. Find your soul and live a soulful life.” This was the opposite of Olympian religion, where the goal for a man was to be a warrior. The best way to die was in war, and Achilles and Odysseus—these war heroes—were the great heroes. Theseus, right? He went to Minos and slayed the Minotaur. It was all about feats of arms and warfare—Hercules, right? So now you get the idea that, no, actually, these warriors are fools because they’ve fallen into the titanic nature of human beings.
What that means is there was a myth underneath all this. When Dionysus was born, his first given name was Zagreus. Zeus adored him and wanted to make him the next king of the gods, even giving him the thunderbolts and letting him sit on the divine throne. Some people say Hera was angry about this because it wasn’t her child and she was Zeus’s wife, but others say it was just the Titans themselves who didn’t need Hera to anger them; they were angry to see Zeus so happy and about to create another god that would keep them from their inheritance. They considered themselves the original gods. They waited for the right opportunity, lured Dion Zagreus off his throne, took him somewhere where Zeus wasn’t looking, slaughtered him, cooked him, and ate him, hoping they would have his power—that they would now have Zeus’s power.
Well, Zeus figures it out, but it’s too late; he sees what’s happening, so he throws lightning and burns the whole horrible scene. From those ashes, humanity is born. So we are part Titan; we hate the gods because of that, and we are angry, vengeful, and afraid. We don’t trust nature, and we want our way above all. But we are also children of Dionysus—pieces of Dionysus. What’s left is the heart, which Zeus was said to have taken and sewn into his thigh as a second womb. Dionysus is born from that. They called him the twice-born. This myth is the origin of humanity, according to Orphism. We are all struggling against our titanic nature, and we live life after life on what they call the weary wheel of grief—very similar to the Hindu concept. They believed you would never remember who you really were; you would just go from one incarnation to the next as a titan, getting into fights, fighting wars, thinking you were succeeding, dying of old age, and repeating this over and over until someday you could wake up within yourself to that Dionysian part of you. When you do, you are on a journey to reclaim your soul.
The Orphics taught that when you die, they had a password they would give you—a death passport—and what you were to say to the guardians was, “I am a child of earth and of starry heaven, but my race is heaven.” They would now give you cold water to drink from the fountain of memory. When you drank from that water instead of from the river of Lethe—where everybody else drinks and forgets everything—when you drank from that fountain of memory, you remembered all your lives. Most importantly, you remembered that you are actually an eternal divine being. As a divine being, you have the right to go be at the feast of the gods and to join the gods in the higher level of existence they partake in. This was the Orphic myth, and it meant that if you were a warrior—if you were the hero of your city—to an Orphic, you were a sad case because you would be reincarnated over and over again. You had no clue what you were doing. Killing is the worst thing you could do. This is a radical philosophy, and I think just from describing it, you can see how influential it was on Christianity, right? Christianity comes later, and it’s totally like if you read Greek philosophy and Dionysian mythology, you can see how later writers definitely tried to reconcile and incorporate these two through Dionysus and Zeus because in their Olympic pantheon, they have a complete set: a first generation of gods, a second generation, and in third generation, Zeus is the acting ruler. The Titans are all banished; they’re not dead, but they’re in the background, in Tartarus.
But in this chain of gods, there’s no Dionysus.
Later, they realize that Dionysus is blended in, and like some ancient authors, they’re trying to say that Dionysus was before Uranus and before Zeus was born—so was the divine soul. From Zeus came; he tried to reestablish his ancestry through Dionysus. So it’s very powerful that that soul is shared by humanity because we came from heaven. So later writers made a very nice blend through Orphism, the Pythagorean, and Hindu reincarnation—metempsychosis—all these things. So it’s a comprehensive, very nice story.
The problem is that most people just read that Dionysus is the bacchae or the crazy part, but they don’t realize that the life force doesn’t follow rationality—it has its own rules; either you comply or get destroyed. There’s no compromise in between.
That was a really interesting turn of events, but you just—
I was just going to say he’s been called the indestructibility of life.
Exactly. I think the root word was “Zoe,” like “Zoe,” like there’s even a name “Zoe,” right?
You know your stuff; you know this stuff very well.
Exactly, and that persona is very irrational. He is all about femininity and sexuality. I don’t know if the name was intentional or not in the TV series “Friends”—“Zoe.”
Yeah.
But that matches very nicely.
It does, yeah.
Exactly. You just mentioned that even that not-so-common myth is foundational for Christianity. So why don’t you elaborate on that?
Okay. Well, you mentioned Greek philosophy and the influence of that myth on Plato, and then through Plato on the Neoplatonists is massive. There were Neoplatonists in the ancient world who argued—for instance, Olympiodorus—that Plato was Orphic. Even though he insults Orpheus in his dialogues as a coward, his philosophy was saturated with Orphic concepts. Most of the Neoplatonists held this opinion, and it’s interesting that in academia, at first this was understood—like in Christianity, they were reading these materials. The early church fathers were arguing that this Orphic stuff is pre-Christian—this is good; we can learn and take things from this. But then, at least by 1900, a little earlier, they came to see the Neoplatonists as mystics and just ridiculous. They didn’t understand Plato at all. Plato himself was dismissed to a degree because they wanted to view him as a sociologist, a mathematician, and a political theorist. They wanted to forget that, for instance, he said that the ruler of his perfect city should be a council of Orphic priests. They actually argued, “Well, he must have been senile when he wrote that.” More recently, academia has discovered a respect for esotericism and a desire to preserve these ideas and understand them. We are seeing a return to the idea that the Neoplatonists had a deep understanding of what was really being said in Plato and that the Orphic influence was profound.
Now, through Plato and through some of the early surviving Neoplatonic material influencing some early church fathers who came out of Neoplatonism and became Christians, they were still influenced by Plotinus and Proclus. Not so much Ammonius, who falls to the side because he’s so into magic and the art of becoming one with the gods that the Christians find him a little too pagan. But Plotinus had incredibly beautiful mystical ideas about the world. For instance, his statement, “Everything breathes together,” and, of course, Proclus’s complex analysis of the psychology of being and the ontology of it appealed to some early church fathers as they adapted some of these ideas. These very Orphic concepts found a way into Christianity to such a degree that you sometimes see overlaps. For instance, in the catacombs, you can see Orpheus and Jesus both being invoked. You can see Jesus overtaking Orpheus’s good shepherd imagery because in the pagan world, Orpheus was almost always shown surrounded by animals that were listening to him sing. This was interpreted by Christians as well—Jesus, you know, is also attracting the animals because the lion sleeps with the lamb when Jesus’s energy is there when Jesus is present. This is kind of an Orphic gift of harmonizing without music and that one should be nonviolent and that killing is not noble; we’re trying to recover our true souls and forget ourselves and lose ourselves. All these ideas wind up in Christianity, not only from Orphic influence, but from other influences as well. But Orphism is a strong influence on that.
You can’t find too much in the ancient world that closely resembles Christianity. Its denial of getting the most out of life and all those philosophies.
This particular connection between Orphism, Dionysus, and Christianity is very conveniently omitted. Everybody is silent because that correlation is so strong. For example, there are not many gods born twice.
Right. Exactly.
That is one.
Yeah.
And not many gods have a pre-existence before bodily presence because all the Dionysus was pre-existent. Before his body came, he was already there.
Yes. Another correlation, I think, is that in the early 1st century and 2nd century, there was a scandal where Christians were accused of cannibalism—eating the flesh of other Christians—because Dionysus was killed and eaten.
Exactly.
Plus, the bread and wine in the last supper—right?
That’s what I say. And the wine—above all, the wine, right? The essence of the vine. And let’s not forget that there’s this sense that the existing political military order is wrong and must be challenged. So there’s a revolutionary quality in these religions. Also, in early Christianity, women had a strong presence, which was also true in the Dionysian rites, right?
Yeah, it’s pretty amazing when you look at it how many similarities there are.
Another geopolitical point I would mention is the plebeian revolt before the actual end of kingship and the rebirth of the Senate—like around 400 BC.
At that time, the plebeians, their high god was Liber Pater.
Yes.
Those were like village people, heathens, versus the more city people—more Olympian type, like Zeus.
Yes.
So it’s liberator versus Dionysus—that’s the fight.
The same thing is happening today—like celebrity versus common people like us.
Not you; you’re a celebrity. I’m talking about myself.
Right! There’s a tension between these two. I would say there’s a super-perennialism versus the emergence of civilization. So the conflict between these two can be studied inside the Dionysian myth itself.
Absolutely. You can also carry it in another direction. There’s a fascinating book written by Arthur Evans called "The God of Ecstasy." He includes his new translation of the Bacchae. In it, he suggests that the whole European witchcraft tradition that was demonized by the church was really the Dionysian religion, and that it survived for centuries in these small rural groups who wanted to keep alive this pagan celebration of fertility and of the earth and of the vine.
When we combine—and one of the important aspects of all of this—when we were saying rural, we tend to think, “Oh, well, it’s country; it’s not so sophisticated.” To me, it’s very poetic because what they’re looking at is that if you’ve ever had grapevines, in winter, they die out, and you cut them back. It looks like death, and then they only grow in spring, springing up amazingly and wrapping around everything. Then they produce these delicious fruits that intoxicate when you ferment them and make people happy when they’re sad and give them mystical experiences.
Literally, wine liberates.
Yes, exactly! Then you’ve also got the celebration of human sexuality—the fertility that is the image of the thyrsus, right? The fennel stalk with the pine cone on top of it. So you’re celebrating that too because that is the same fertility you see in the grapevine. It’s the ability to rise, to give life, and to this precious fluid of life, whether it’s wine or human reproduction. That’s profound.
Exactly. The same thing—actually, those dried-up, dead grapevines collect the raindrops that come from the heavens, and that’s collected in the grape, and that becomes the life force through sex because wine also stimulates ecstasy.
That’s right.
So, it’s all connected. It’s liberating. It’s emotional, not logical, and it stimulates growth, reproduction, and happiness—like perfect symbolism.
Yes, it really does! It seems in Dionysian myths more than any other myth. That’s why I’m fascinated, and you are the expert because you translated a couple of original Orphic hymns, I believe, right, recently?
Well, I’m certainly not the expert. I know a few people I would recommend above me, but I have studied it for a long time and have read just about everything I can get my hands on. So I am very fascinated with it, and we should definitely mention the work of Alan Daniel—he’s a very controversial figure. He certainly had racist tendencies and found support for his bigotry in the caste system, but at the same time, he was a profound scholar. He has a book, I think, called "The Gods of Ecstasy" that is about how he thinks Shiva is the origin of Dionysus, and he shows you all these similarities—that here is this god that didn’t fit in with the other gods and this god where intoxication was okay for Shiva, but not for others. Just the way sexuality was a constant theme with Shiva and how he was associated with rural areas and wilderness, and with madness—so it’s very possible that this is a translation of Hindu ideas into ancient Greece at a very early period.
Exactly. Dionysus claims that he came from the east. You mentioned Alexander the Great—when he went to Bactria and tried to conquer and kill the kings, they said, “Hey, we worship the same god, Dionysus. Don’t you worship Dionysus? Dionysus is our god too.” Then he like stopped the war and married a couple of women there.
Yes! When it comes to spirituality, most of the time, people conquer other people because they’re not like us—they’re different from us; they pray to a different god. But when you can show that, actually, we worship the same god, you become friends!
So that was a sudden change of heart, I don’t know why, in Alexander the Great. That’s why he did not inflict too much damage in India—when he realized, actually, he, as a person, is also very Dionysian because he drinks a lot and heals a lot, plus he had the esoteric teachings of those Orphic mysteries before he came, right? His father is Philip.
He’s not from Greek proper; he came from Macedonia.
Right! Then he was going around the world conquering, and there’s just something other Greek gods are not doing.
Yeah, they don’t go outside, exactly.
Now I think we covered just the basic mythology part that, even though it appears, it’s just another myth, if you connect all of them together, it’s a very powerful and central myth that covers both east and proper Greece together.
Yes.
Now let’s talk about some specific aspects. For example, you covered the Christianity connection and its influence on Dionysus in the future development of religion. I have a couple of questions. For example, you mentioned Plato.
Yes.
In the mythology, there was a person—I think his name was Silenus, something like that.
Yes.
He was the tutor and nurturer of the infant or younger Dionysus, and he was a chubby guy with a big stomach who always drank and was associated with other goats. He was a perfect analogy of Socrates.
Yes, and philosophy is based on Socrates’ mouthpiece, right? And also during the symposium, they all drink wine and talk about all kinds of things, and at the end, Socrates says the highest person he has ever respected was the eros or something like that, and that eros is actually Dionysian.
So even though Plato himself was a good poet, he hated poetry. At the end, he represents this tradition rather than fighting. Let’s talk about some symbolisms. What are the classic symbolisms of Dionysus? You mentioned pine cone, and you also mentioned wine. I think we covered wine. You also briefly mentioned animals.
Let’s talk about animals.
Well, we have the bull, which is usually associated, as a symbol, with tremendous fertility and strength. Yet it is an aggressive animal; it is aggressive in defense and not a predator. On the predator side, you have the panther, which was sacred. Just like Durga, you see Dionysus being portrayed as riding on a panther very often. This symbolism of the cat some people have thought points back to Egypt. This is interesting because when you look back in Egypt for something resembling this, you find it, but not in the way you would expect to: you find it in a female goddess, and that is the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet. She is also a goddess of intoxication, and her festival—supposedly, Herodotus says—300,000 people showed up in Egypt. It was all about music and intoxication and what happens when those two are together. She was also called the invincible one, and she was the one who guarded the life force—the balance of nature, maat—that is required for life to exist and continue. She is the invincible guardian of that. She’s even called the one before whom all other gods tremble. In a way, Dionysus is like that too because—
Everything you mentioned—if you did not mention Sekhmet and Egypt, it goes to Dionysus directly.
Exactly.
Yeah. Isn’t that amazing? So, you see, there seems to be a thread that got pulled forward. The funny thing about Greece is that American, English, French, and German—basically, European scholars—spent generations trying to make Greece the origin of the West. The Greeks themselves always said, “Well, we got it from Egypt. We got it from the Phoenicians. We got it from India.” They were very open about it, and yet we had to create this false mythology that these were all original concepts we created. I’m pretty sure that even the mystery schools were of Egyptian influence. Plato said that he studied in Egypt. Pythagoras was said to have gone and studied in Egypt. Orpheus was said to have gone and studied in Egypt.
I also want to point out something else since we’re talking about gender. An interesting evolution involving somebody who goes into hell and saves both his wife and his mother, bringing them out safely and taking them to live with the gods. You can see how Jesus went into hell to save the souls. By the way, this example has a kind of micro message, which is that his wife Ariadne starts out as the love interest of a great warrior, Theseus—this might be the primal Greek warrior symbol next to Hercules. She helps him defeat her own father and get through the labyrinth to kill the Minotaur, but then he just dumps her. He’s like a classic patriarchal hero—thanks for the help; I’m taking what I need and see you later. He just leaves her on an island, and she wants to commit suicide. In some versions, she even does it. But along comes Dionysus, who thinks she’s the most wonderful soul he’s ever encountered. He goes back, takes her out of hell, makes her his wife, and then takes her up to be divine. The same thing happens with his mother, who was a mortal woman. Famously, the story goes that Hera was very jealous that Zeus was smitten with Ariadne’s mother, Semele. She said, “Hey, why don’t you ask Zeus to show his full glory?” Because that’s what he does with Hera. “If he really loves you, he should do this.” Now, she knew what would happen. Zeus tells her, “Don’t ask for this, because you will not survive seeing me in my glory. You’re just mortal.” But she pushes, saying, “You said you would do anything I ask, and this is what I ask.” He reveals his glory, and she’s killed.
Along comes her son Dionysus. He takes his mother out of hell, and whatever Hera thinks—forget it! I’m the son of Zeus, and I’m taking her up into heaven to be with the gods. This rescuing function is something we see with Jesus. But here’s the interesting point: Orpheus tries to do the same thing when his wife, Eurydice, dies. He tries to go into hell to redeem her. We have the tragic story of the backward glance; he does not accomplish what Dionysus accomplished, partially because he can’t overcome his impatience. He’s told, “Do not look at her. Don’t turn back and look. Just keep going, and if she goes out into the sunlight without you looking at her, she’ll be back in the world of the living.” But he can’t stand it, and he looks back too soon, losing her forever. This is a very ironic change, and now another interesting thing is—what does he do? He’s heartbroken. Every morning, he sings to the sun when it comes up. He’s singing to Apollo. He’s abandoned, in a way, Dionysus and the Maenads and this whole culture. Now, in a way, he’s talking to Apollo, and Apollo is teaching him the mysteries of the gods.
This isn’t necessarily a conflict, since Apollo is said to save Dionysus. The Neoplatonists said that Apollo’s name literally means “not many” because his job is to gather all of us broken pieces—or sometimes called the fears of Dionysus—and restore us all to the full glory of the body of Dionysus. It’s still a shift because now Dionysus is no longer at the center of the religion. Now it’s Apollo who’s at the center.
I really think this is a Pythagorean modification or blending, I would say—a syncretism.
Yes, exactly! There’s an earlier tradition that they adapt, and it’s interesting too because it used to be thought that the Orphics were a great church—that there were Orphic temples—and European scholars used to write about this, claiming, for example, to have found an image of a figure hanging on a cross with “Oros” or a boy on it. Unfortunately, it was destroyed during World War II, in the museum it was in, and it was lost. They don’t know if it was a forgery or not because they didn’t have the tests at the time, but this was held up as evidence of how much influence on Christianity there was. Here is Orpheus hanging on a cross. The theory was that during the Orphic initiation, you would be hung on a cross that spins. This was supposed to give you a symbolic experience where you were told while it was happening, “Basically, this is your soul having forgotten itself, whirling lost through space.” Then they would let you go, and you couldn’t stay up because your balance was all wrecked and you’d probably fall over. They would say, “That’s what your soul is like because you’ve forgotten what you are.”
Probably. I mean, we have no evidence of any of this really outside the imaginations of the authors. But it’s interesting to see how this attempt was made to construct that there was a 600-year Orphic church. But now we think it was more of a literary movement. There were Orphic priests who were more like street priests, going city to city looking for rich people who had either just died or who were sick. They would come to the door and offer to do purification rituals to guarantee a transition into the after-death state that would preserve consciousness. They had all these books supposedly by Orpheus but by all sorts of people, and they were all signed as Orpheus. They would sell them. They were not unlike the Egyptian Books of the Dead, intended to be read for the dead person’s edification, so they would have guidance in the afterworld. But the thought was that the hymns and some of these other Orphic materials were actually creations of these intellectual symposiums, very similar to what Plato describes where people got together, drank, and for example, modern scholars have pointed out that the Orphic hymns seem to be in an order that really builds up. The middle hymns really get into intoxication and sexual even resonances, but as it begins to close, it goes into topics like sleep and death. It closes with death. It’s like, “Wake up! Sober up! We’re done with the symposium!”
It’s also interesting, by the way, that they way they talk about death. Some religions will beg death, saying, “Come later; give me a reprieve; don’t take my loved one.” They don’t do that. They say, “Death is—you can’t bargain with death.” But we can thank death. What we’re thanking death for is, first, for increasing our appreciation of life and of who and what we love. Because when we lose someone, when we realize impermanence—which we’re always trying to forget—we suddenly realize how precious these people and things and pets and just the things that we love are to us and in that world of impermanence that we pour love out on it because we are feeling this grief. But the other thing death gives us is liberation. Death gives us this chance to remember—right? To remember who we are and what we are.
Exactly. I think in the topics you just mentioned, it runs parallel with the Eleusinian mystery school, which was pretty much Orphic. Whenever the Orphic stuff comes up, it’s based on, directly or indirectly, Dionysian myth.
Yes.
At the end, I think after the initial ecstasy and dancing and everything, there was something related to death and how to overcome death. The thing you just mentioned—how to be thankful for death. I think that mystery was revealed only to the initiates because it was a private school, and that’s why we know so little about it. Somehow those ideas are borrowed in the subsequent religions, including Christianity, right?
Yes, well it’s funny; Manly Hall—aside from working with him—he was a great friend, and he really adored my wife. He gave me incredible opportunities, and sometimes we would just hang out at their house. He and his wife, Marie, had some amazing moments. For example, at one time, they were watching television, changing channels, and TV came on in the 1980s. You know, this was really MTV. He left it on for a minute, and Tam and I, my wife, were looking at each other like, “Oh, wow!” You know, like, “What’s he going to say?” What he said was, “What a pity it was because they were resurrecting all the technology of the mysteries—the lights, the music, the words, the fog—and they were waking the psychic centers of the audience, but they weren’t teaching them anything.”
Exactly! It’s just the entertainment part.
Yeah. At the end, typically, everybody went there not for drinking, I believe, because even people at their time had value. Entry was difficult; you had to pay or do something or prove yourself to be worthy to be initiated, right? Everybody went there either to gain something or to get immortality or to get some clue—something. At the end, the priest definitely did something to them; they changed their lives. That’s how the tradition continued for hundreds of years.
Yeah. We don’t have a lot of witness accounts because they were sworn to secrecy, but we do have Plutarch talking about his experience of the mysteries. He and his wife were able to deal with the grief of the death of one of their children because of what they learned in those mysteries, which is that the body is not the end. We have souls that go on. He describes one intriguing aspect: he said part of the experience was like running through dark caverns, and you would panic because you couldn’t see where you were going. People would fall and bruise themselves, and then they would see light in the distance. They would run toward that light, and when they got there, they would burst onto a beautiful green field where musicians were playing and where these beautiful words were being recited or sung. These words—you know, it was meant to recreate the death experience.
Another thing that they said was happening in the Orphic mysteries—we don’t know if it’s true or not, but it could be—was that the Orphic mysteries was one of the first places where they had the first caverns you would enter, and they had paintings of all the suffering of human life—disease, corpses, war, natural disaster. In those days, unless it happened to your village or you were traveling, it’s not like today, where you turn on the feed and see every disaster from every corner of the world. You didn’t normally see all these things in one place, which impinged on you the sense of impermanence and suffering. You were told to wear, I think it’s called a thronodos, which is a death shroud, and you’d sit on a stool in a death shroud in a dark place after seeing all these things so that you could sit and really feel fear and insecurity and how you really don’t know where any of your life is going or where this experience is going.
In some mysteries, I do know there were reports that there was a fear that maybe you would be killed or something; they didn’t really know what was going to happen depending on how the mysteries were conducted. The Orphic ones were more peaceful because they didn’t have that violent component, but there were other mysteries that were told about in a more warrior-like manner where there could be this kind of challenge by the guardians—armed people who would challenge you to respond correctly. This is almost like spirituality by theater. It’s a real-life enactment of ritual. But to the uninitiated, they might get frightened, and they might think they would get killed because nobody told them.
Exactly!
It was real to them. Yes.
And that’s how it became life-changing because if you watch something and you know it’s fake, at the beginning, you don’t connect. But if you participate without knowing whether it is just a ritual or a real deal, then you go through the process; you get frightened at the end, you have a near-death experience, but after that, you see greenery. You just mentioned it’s like life after life, right?
Yes, precisely! In some forms of the mysteries, I mean there’s arguments about this—they say that in some of the mysteries like the Eleusinian, there was some sort of drink taken that may have had hallucinogenic properties. They talk about ergot or mushrooms being proposed, but in fact, an interesting thing—I’ve been working on a paper with a colleague. Robert Graves correctly pointed out a strange thing about Orpheus: he is always portrayed with a lyre. In those days, you had to string with animal gut, so it didn’t make a lot of sense that Orpheus, who prohibits killing animals for the gods, would make his sacred songs on animal guts.
The suggestion from Graves was that this might be because what he really used was a flute, and flutes were used very much in early Greek religion. My colleague went and researched the reeds in the area that were made into flutes and found this giant reed, especially connected to mystery schools and cultivated often next to them. The biggest shock was that this reed has precursors of DMT in it!
If you grow it at different times—there were strict rules about when to harvest for which ritual. His idea is that this was because they had learned when it was potent in certain ways. For this ritual, you’d want this potency; for that ritual, you’d want a different potency. But the magician, the musician, or anyone using this flute was imbibing DMT essentially.
So that’s a possibility.
Yeah, even though there’s literature suggesting there must be some drink—either alcoholic, non-alcoholic, mushroom, or DMT—but my gut feeling is that those are merely to create the right environment, not necessarily the actual tool that creates a nice environment. They are more suggestive and more perceptive, but at the end, it’s the whole ritual or initiation process itself rather than the drug.
Absolutely, yes! Because that’s the primary mistake that was made. You know, in the 60s, Timothy Leary and a lot of people thought that drugs didn’t do anything for it.
It doesn’t; it amplifies!
It amplifies! All initiated and liberated, right?
That’s right! Exactly! And I always tell people—you know, for instance, shrooms—which people think are amazing cures for human dysfunction. The guy who invented 4chan, I believe, maybe it was 8chan—I’m not sure—but he did it on shrooms. A lot of bad things were invented while people were high. It doesn’t mean you’re only going to have good ideas. You’re going to have—I mean, Charlie Manson was high; you have ideas that reflect who you are. Now, in a controlled environment where the mystery school is showing you these symbols and putting you through these symbolic experiences, it helps to get rid of the inhibitions, open up the mind and heart, and make you more susceptible to being a hypnotic influence, especially when it has ecstatic connotations to it. It’s going to make you more receptive to the experience you’re having.
Suppose the ritual or rite—the participant might feel it’s real. There may be pretending as part of the ritual, but you are under the influence. You might perceive it as real—like somebody comes with a sword—but if you know that I came with a party, they are not going to kill me. But if you are under the influence, that sword makes you fear that it’s real.
That’s right.
Yeah. Those drugs might contribute to induction, making you more suggestible to perceive things as real rather than just—
To that point, when we go back now to Sekhmet and these festivals, they knew what they were doing too because they would have these all-night festivals. By the morning, people were mostly passed out. They would wheel in the statue of Sekhmet, which was made out of this glittering granite. Just as the sun came up and lit up the statue, they would pound these huge kettle drums, waking everybody up. People would hallucinate that the goddess was talking, that the statue was moving or her eyes looked at them. All these things happened as they woke up from this unconscious state. They would be moved to deep prayers and asking the goddess for help and healing and such.
So the Egyptians were already playing around with that—the technology of spirituality.
About the feminine part that you correlate with Sekhmet; that correlates very nicely with Dionysian traits and the rites.
Dionysus himself was a little bit effeminate, right? He has enlarged breasts, a young guy with beautiful looks. Many people say he was the original Hermaphrodite.
It’s true. There are two different portrayals. The Greeks also portrayed him as a bearded big strong man, you know, Zeus’s kid. But certainly, the one we see in Euripides, for example, is exactly as you describe—this androgynous, feminine side—partially feminine.
So, there aren’t many gods who are born twice and who have two aspects simultaneously because most mystery schools focus on duality—male and female. I’m very interested in learning about mythology because even Plato’s Symposium says back in ancient times, men used to be two parts—one part.
That’s the Hermaphrodite.
So even famous was typically depicted as partial Hermaphrodite, right?
Yes.
Dionysus has that trait; not Zeus.
Not Zeus.
Here’s something interesting too: back to Sekhmet for a moment. She’s a female lioness, but her statues all give her the neck ruff—just a little bit of an adolescent male lion. She’s also this gender blend.
And behind you, I can see there are some cats.
Yes, I’ve got—I also have them in the house. There are none in the room right now, though.
These are past cats who I keep at my shoulder.
Okay. Yeah. I think Sekhmet is typically also associated with cats, not necessarily lionesses, right?
Not necessarily.
Yes, she can be associated. Her sister goddess Bast was originally a lioness goddess but then became famous as that black cat statue. Usually, Sekhmet is depicted with a lion’s head or as a lioness, but she too also has it. There’s a famous story passed down among pagans, who are into cats and who know about Egypt, where the story goes that I think personally this was a piece of sophisticated and humorous literature by the Egyptians—it was pretty sophisticated and not purely religious. The story was that Ra got old and that the human race didn’t respect him anymore. They began to be cheaters and liars and murderers, and he got disgusted with it. He wanted to punish humanity, so he sent his daughter Hathor, who was a love goddess, a beauty goddess, and a fertility goddess, down there in the form of a lioness. She was to start killing the unjust humans. She started doing it, and what awakened from her as she did it was Sekhmet. She transformed into this primal goddess of justice.
The problem with that was that no human being was good enough. We were all not so good. So, she was going to kill everybody. Ra decided, “Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! I didn’t want to kill everybody!” So, they say Thoth had the idea—let’s put wine out there! She’s sleeping it off right now. “Let’s pour a huge amount of red beer, and she’ll think it’s blood. When she wakes up, she’ll be thirsty, and she’ll drink this, and then she’ll get inebriated. She’ll be okay.”
This is what happens. When the morning sun comes up, she sees all this and starts drinking, then she gets inebriated and is happy; she forgets all about killing human beings. But the funny part about that story is what pagans did with it. They said that when she figured out what had been done to her, she was very angry because she said Ra had taken advantage of her. First, he forced her to act out his rage—he could have done it, but he made her do it, which was wrong. Then, he got her drunk without her even knowing she was getting drunk to stop her from doing that. So she announced, “I’m done with you gods. I’ll tell you this: I will be remembered and worshipped long after all you gods are forgotten.”
The other gods said, “Well, how is that going to happen?” She said, “I’m turning myself into all domestic cats.”
Everybody!
Every little cat is a Sekhmet according to this myth.
That’s an interesting take. I never heard that. In the recent Olympics in France, I believe, people criticized why they were putting a weird person at the center. When I recognized, “Oh, he’s Dionysus.”
Yes.
Then I realized, “No, no, no, they’re not stupid.” The French people are very cultured; they know what they’re doing.
Exactly.
From the outside, they’re saying, “They’re pushing this transgender idea.”
But actually, they’re not pushing—it’s just—
It’s an ancient god.
Yes! He was trans from the very beginning, right? He used feminine clothes and everything.
So in our contemporary life, especially in Hollywood, especially the music industry—
Like Dionysus!
Yes! I think so. And I think you also, I mean, you had some very overt examples, right? Like Jim Morrison, who was somebody who deeply got into Dionysus through Nietzsche. But also, I was lucky to meet his—actually become friends with his pagan bride, Pamela Courson Morrison, who was a Christian witch, she called herself. She told me that he had studied the hymns of Orpheus as well and that this was an influence on him. Greek theater, the hymns of Orpheus, the Greek mysteries, were part of the way he presented his songs in this exaggerated delivery that was filled with these intimations of important revelations he had picked up from the Greeks and from reading about what they were doing.
I certainly think that it has sometimes been a very serious effort like on his part. I mean, he even asked to have his hair cut to look like Alexander, you know? He was deliberately manipulating aspects of Greek history and myth in his work, but I think it’s also active—maybe let’s call it in a Jungian sense—where you see that this androgynous quality, whether of the men or the women. We see women who may be dressed very femininely, very sexually, but their behavior is quote-unquote like men. They’re aggressive, they’re athletic, they’re warriors, you know? This androgyny was ultimately so embraced by Hollywood and the music industry. I definitely think it’s still there. I don’t think it’s the overt—I always hear about how there are these cults and they’re—I mean, I don’t know. I’ve lived my whole life out here. I’ve been in the movie business, I’ve been in the music business; I never ran into any. I’m sure that there were some weird things going on; I have no doubt about it. But in terms of some big organized satanic or—
No, I mean it’s a bunch of greedy people who are all arguing with each other, making group decisions, often bad decisions. I think there’s a level of paranoia that’s attached to it. But I do think there’s definitely that archetype functioning through Hollywood. I mean, when you come here, it brings out things in people. It’s almost like Euripides; it’s almost like the Bacchae, right? People come to LA, and they lose it!
Like Pentheus. They want to know what what they’re up to.
Exactly! They cannot resist what they’re doing. Somehow the problem is, like, I have a lot of friends who are just regular professionals—just normal people.
They have no idea this kind of thing is not just the old tale in the past; they are living culture embedded inside in a different brand name.
Right. Different brand name.
So if it’s being practiced and adored and respected by the people we respect, then what is the real story? That is my motivation because this is just like a regular person. Why should I even bother with those old dead cultures?
Actually, they’re not dead—they’re not dead at all!
Not at all, yeah.
Exactly.
In the like, we already talked about the influence on Christianity, the influence of philosophy including Neoplatonism, and the influence on modern contemporary American culture.
Yeah.
So, one thing we did not mention about Abrahamic religions like Judaism and Islam—because Christianity is already covered—are there some correlations? In Bacchae, I think there was a statement by Dionysus that “You look like a man, so why should I consider you a god?” He says, “It is not my bidding what I will appear.” He can choose his own form. That means I can be whoever I want to be—or he’s somebody who wants to be. That is the quotation “I am who I am,” identical to what Dionysus is saying. I can be in any form, and that is not my choice.
It’s his choice! He’s talking about himself in the third person!
Right.
That was one connection I saw; that sentence matches because I’m from a tradition that is more Abrahamic.
Yes.
Like Bangladesh, India—those people—everyone is born as Hindu; you understand what I’m saying?
Yes.
The second point I noticed that was interesting is that wine is also present in the Old Testament ritual; the high priest offered the wine, right? In the initiation of kings by the oil, that’s libation culture—that’s Dionysian primary rite.
Right—very primary!
Yes.
So the Dionysian part is not out of context in the Abrahamic faith.
No! I think it actually—think about it this way: it reappears consistently. So if you look at the religion of Judaism and you look at David, he’s singing. There are said to be mysteries contained within those songs. Is he singing to the woman he loves or is this the soul singing to God? This is profoundly Orphic; it may predate it. In fact, in the ancient world in Alexandria, during the times of the Roman Tullys ruling Egypt, they actually created a book called the Testament of Orpheus, which claimed that Orpheus studied with Moses because of the similarities they saw in the teachings and the magic involved in the Old Testament. There’s a magic involved, ritual. They’re very parallel.
And the life force itself.
Yes.
Then it returns later in medieval times in the troubadour tradition, where Sir Orpheus was a very popular character for the troubadours to sing about. This lost love, this backward glance was such a big part of troubadour romantic love. They would declare love to some queen they could never hope to touch, but they would serve her and long for her. I would also suggest that you see it in Islam, especially through Sufism, where you see in Rumi, for example, somebody who is using the language of intoxication to talk about not actually being drunk, but about being drunk with God.
Exactly, exactly! And that was the purpose of the Eleusinian mystery as well. The core tenant remains the same, somehow. That’s why it’s so powerful.
So powerful! One thing I wanted to mention, Herodotus, because I learned this very recently after I contacted you. I recently read about it. Herodotus wrote in his history—this is like 400 BC, a very long time ago—that at that time in Arabia, there was no culture of written language. It’s all oral. They lived as Bedouins, in a very rural, plebeian style. They didn’t have any kings for a long time.
Yeah.
So they ruled themselves like a shepherd, and the shepherd is the herder of Dionysian tradition.
Yeah.
Herodotus specifically wrote that Arabian people worshipped two gods: one was Al-Lat. Scholars have translated that as Allah, the Abrahamic Islamic god. The other one is Aphrodite, that was Al-‘Uzzá, the feminine part.
When I realize this rain symbolism with the grapevine, rain is the mercy of God in the Islamic religion.
Yeah.
Another one I think correlates very closely is that the life force is always indestructible. Whatever you do, it remains. So those are still like not irrelevant. Somehow, there is one myth I see pervading everywhere—consistent—is the Dionysian myth. Surprisingly, we know very little about that as normal educated people unless you are a scholar. Unless you study this subject, normal people don’t even come close to being aware that this is a very fundamental myth of human society, right across—
Even though it’s our heritage for all of us.
Yeah, exactly!
It’s something that I think if you look at how, for instance, most of the Greek gods are gods who are part of the polis—who support the polis, the city and the city-state. Dionysus remained somebody who was not on good terms with the state.
Married to one city!
Exactly! When you look at that and you consider history, think about how we have examples, like Egypt and Rome, where we have either the syncretism of, “Oh wow! Your god reminds me very much of our god. Hermes really reminds me of Mercury, so they’re the same god.” We’ll have Hermes’ statue up there, too, because that’s great! Or you have the Egyptians who would acquire gods they respected and find similarities between them.
Now, how does this get replaced all over in the pagan world and the Abrahamic world? Everywhere—how does it get replaced with, “My way is the only way,” and “We will kill each other until somebody wins”? Politics! It’s so interesting that the most primal spiritual story—or whatever you want to call it—is hostile to politics and is a source of unity in all religions.
Exactly, exactly! That’s why Sufism tries to be cross—like Judaism, cross-Christianity—they try to assimilate the similar ideas inside Islam. Because Islam, like traditionally, is very strict. They want nothing to do with Christian other than recognizing Jesus as a prophet. They don’t want anything to do with Judaism other than some good prophets—they are rightly so.
But Sufism, they try to incorporate this wine, intoxication, music, harmony, illogical consciousness—these languages are very similar. Surprisingly, many people will be surprised that Islam is such a strict monotheism; we don’t have anything to do with Dionysus or any other Greek culture. But if you dig deeper, you see there are some threads across cultures; you can’t deny that.
Yeah, I mean, I’m even struck—this may be pushing it a little, but if you look at somebody like Rumi, he’s got his torch, and she’s looking for truth. She’s almost a Maenad in a way. You know, she’s so antisocial, but yet she’s the absolute symbol of—
Exactly! The soul is one, but they divide it into lower and higher. The lower is the part of your soul that keeps this working and makes it keep going and deals with the world out here—it’s your day-to-day consciousness and your unconscious. The higher soul is never immersed in this; it knows what it is, which is pure consciousness.
When you live in the lower soul, you have a claustrophobic, fearful experience of life. You’re identified with the body; you feel frail. You feel that the world is a big, crazy, chaotic place where anything can happen to you. It feels like the world goes on, but you won’t, and all these feelings that create anger, fear, sadness, alienation, and, most importantly, an obsession with death.
Exactly!
The reason for that obsession with death is that the soul longs for freedom. It longs to be away from this claustrophobia of keeping these millions of.
Yes. But it doesn’t know that it is already permanent because it’s—
Exactly!
Restricting to see. It’s like an analogy. For example, suppose a light reflects in the mirror and goes to the wall. The wall portion of the illuminated part is the lower self. They don’t see the source as the identical. It’s just the body that reflects the lower self. But the higher self is not worried because it already knows that everything is included—the lower self is already included. The only problem is the lower self.
Yes.
The lower self has to recognize that I’m just not a separate entity; it’s a continuum of the original self.
Yes. When you achieve that, the way you relate to life is completely different. You love it; you accept the mystery.
I have to just do the right thing in front of me and enjoy life.
That’s right!
Nothing else to go. So that part I understood after listening to Manly Hall—that actually, you are not going anywhere because wherever you want to go, you won’t like it, or it might not be real. The only real and real stuff is here already; it’s in that present moment.
Exactly!
You’re very welcome, and I’m certainly willing to speak with you anytime about him or anything else.
Yeah, exactly! So I’ll be in touch with you and email you, and if I find something interesting that aligns with your view, I’ll study it first. Then, I’ll invite you to talk. For example, I studied a little bit about Dionysus before talking with you; actually, it helped me to participate. Otherwise, I’d just be a listener, right?
Well, you did a beautiful job! You were able to delve into some very deep levels, and I appreciate that you did that.
Thank you! Thank you! So, we’ll meet again, and thank you!
Yes, indeed; thank you! Bye-bye!