He’s a Shaman who crawls the World Tree, climbs Kunlun and follows a song from world to world. Lonely but never isolated, he’s set apart by his duty: to speak to humans and spirits; tell each side what the other wants; and, when necessary, bring angry gods to heel. The last part breaks his life’s symmetry. He’s from a world of flesh, not ephemera, and that’s where his final loyalties lie. Nevertheless, he sees the shared pulse of mortal and ephemeral life. He sings its music. He could even get lost in it to be reborn an Ecstatic, a living example of simple, forgotten truths. Followers of the Path often tread between these extremes along the living axis mundi that binds diverse realms and states of being.

His soul erases the divisions that cut others in two. Others aren’t so lucky. The border makes them bleed. A Thyrsus heals or buries them as his conscience demands.

Ruling Arcana

Life and Spirit. The Primal Wild’s cosmic Moon leaves its reflection in the material realm’s Life and casts the Shadow that Spirit commands. Thyrsus consider them to be two halves of the same dominion. Change one, and the other reacts.

Life’s the seat of sex, hunger, and the fight or flight response. It’s everything we eat and the worms that devour us when we die, resurrect our flesh as theirs, and make us immortal. The Ecstatic honors Life’s primal sensations and celebrates its lesson: We’re not individuals, but colonies of tissue and bacteria that divide, are broken, and are reborn in ecological miracles.

The world lives and speaks. Before the Fall, anyone could gaze into the Shadow. The Lie blinds Spirit-senses, and even Awakened souls must practice to reclaim them, but Thyrsus see with fully open eyes, and their hands easily caress the gods beyond the Gauntlet. They know what we’ve forgotten: Material light and the Shadow are one realm.

Inferior Arcanum

Mind. To imagine Mind as a coherent Arcana asks Thyrsus to deny the holistic nature of existence. To a Shaman, human consciousness is an adaptation, like a thumb or biped’s gait. That people can imagine themselves as individual minds is no more relevant than a lion’s jaws. They’re functions, not truths of the soul.

Symbols and Myths

The Hermit and the Moon. Culture heroes and totems. Nature, the living earth, love, and lust. Rough archetypes and personal gods.

The Awakened Tarot calls the Thyrsus the Path of the Hermit. She’s journeyed into an apparent wasteland and returned, filled with stories of the lush places hidden in the barrens. The savage paradise left wounds but gave her power. Her Mystery card’s The Moon, symbol of primordial spirituality. The Moon shines through a thin skin of rational excuses, revealing the veins of pain, pleasure, fear, and rage that really motivate us. Just as our organs and tissues grow as our genes command, our imagination ripens around archetypes that exist before we call them Beast, Hunter, Lover, Gatherer, Leader, Death, and the rest.