All Processions draw their symbolic resonance from the act of Pilgrimage with its indications of progress & the shedding of earthly weights and material existence. J.E. Cirlot writes: "every procession is a rite which gives substance to the concept of the cycle and passage of time, as is proved by the fact of its returning to the point of departure."

The Pillar to the right is in Burgos, Spain and is set near the Cathedral. Burgos is a main stop on the ancient Pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in Northwestern Spain. A pilgrimage is not aimless wandering; it is purposeful and always implies a goal which is usually sacred. "Pilgrimage symbolizes the journey back to Paradise or to the Center; man, as a stranger in the world of manifestation, journeys back to his true home. All pilgrimage is made difficult, symbolizing the difficulty of regaining Paradise or finding spiritual enlightenment." The Pilgrim road to Santiago in Spain has been operating since about 800AD and on average carrys between a half-million to 2 million pilgrims a year. Goethe claimed that Europe as a geopolitical entity was created on the road to Santiago. During the medieval, the pilgrim road was the only place you would meet a foreigner without trying to kill him.

So once the Pillar Pull wound its way back to the Atelier the party could begin. IwoJima and his Band Pocket Groove were set up on the exterior lip of the shop - some of his many daughters - the ones we call the Celtic Girls, were tuning the bongos and stringing the oboe. For most of the day the crowd had been mellow and you could steer it if you had a stick. But there was an electric charge to the mob as it made the last turn into the woody grounds of the Atelier. St. Elmo's Fire on the leading edges. A mob of citizens is a dull beast until you oil it with drugs and beam loud percussions and saxophones at it. And of course we had planned to have a fire. How can you scream at the night without a fire?

"I was the first to take seriously that wonderful phenomenon which bears the name Dionysos . . . an instinct still exuberant and even overflowing . . . an excess of energy." What the Greeks called Orgy - where life spills out recklessly. "Not so as to get rid of pity and terror . . . but to realize in one self the eternal joy of becoming." Nietzsche said that, Pooler Jones instructed us as if we were unruly children and not Adventure Theologians. In Twilight of the Idols. Still, I see his point, and how Pooler is using it to prod Slag into great things. All Art evolves from Orgy. Nietzsche was right about that, and right too that Goethe couldn't see that - so he missed the point about Tragedy. The Will to Life sees beyond life and into Death. And then thru the Nigredo back into Life. So the Greeks knew what a well-lifted pole could signify. And it did not disturb their moral center an iota. Phallus, Pillar and Pole - all one in the same axis-mundi to the Greeks. "All this is contained in the word Dionysos: I know of no more exalted symbolism than this Greek symbolism, the symbolism of the Dionysian. The profoundest instinct of life, the instinct for the future of life, for the eternity of life, is in this word experienced religiously - the actual road to life, procreation, as the sacred road. . . . It was only Christianity, with ressentiment against life in its foundations, which made of sexuality something impure: it threw filth on the beginning, on the prerequisite of our life . . . " Rock on.