Canto X: The Hangover of the God

The celebration gave way to a hangover. DOGE fell sharply after its May 2021 peak and ended the year far below it. The drop below $0.10 came in 2022, not December 2021. The decline crossed seasons; Dionysus learned that calendars also belong to memory.

In July 2021, Jackson Palmer published a long manifesto breaking his silence on crypto. His assessment was devastating: he confirmed he did not plan to return to the ecosystem, describing the industry as exploitative of people's financial insecurity and controlled by a cartel of rich figures who use others' suffering to enrich themselves. He declared he would never return.

Palmer's words were legitimate and deserved to be heard. Speculation had harmed real people. Extreme volatility was devastating for those who invested resources they could not afford to lose. Dionysian ecstasy, when appropriated by forces of financial exploitation, becomes its opposite: not the liberation the god promises, but the trap that charlatans build in its shadow.

And yet, r/dogecoin continued. With less intensity, with more humility, with the quietude of a community that had survived the peak and the valley and chosen to remain. Not for the gains, the gains had been and gone. For the same reasons that had created the cult in 2013: generosity, humor, the sense of belonging to something that did not take itself as seriously as the world sometimes demands.

Dionysus, in Hellenic tradition, is not eternal in the sense other gods are. He is the god who dies and is reborn, associated with the cycles of the vine, with the winter that freezes and the summer that ferments. His resurrection is not miraculous: it is seasonal, predictable, inevitable. The Dogecoin of 2021 had completed its first major cycle of death and rebirth. The cult that survives this no longer needs external proof of value.