“To the fuller discussion of the Kabiric and Dactylic cults which I now believe to underlie much of Orphic mysticism, I hope to return on some future occasion.”
Jane Ellen Harrison, Proglegomona to the Study of Greek Religion

Are you the earthly feet of the godhead?
Are you the gloomy forms emerging from the friction of soil and moisture?
Are you gods and demons churning the particulate milk of time?
Anxious ancient minds. Marvelous determinations.
Self-creation and uncertainty mounting in the transformations.

Vanished. Away. Toward Samothracian shores wreathed
with sycamores under whose shade they burrow, intensify.
What lust compels them to rush so singlemindedly to the high
kingdom of the Cabiri? They’re little glomerous godlings.
The soul’s delved spectacle: a pageant in their slow-motion meshing.
Ursystem’s secret society they create never entirely knowing what they are.
Bright Moon! Stay. Thicken dusk with a silver starch of light. That day
might be warded and in the gloom we might thrive.
Dwarfish, shriveled, unspectacular bearer of these unruly compounds.
What should your appearance be to us? What new arts
do you bear up from the inaccessible treasure chamber?
What yolk of Moon from the egg of the gods?