# The Circle > **One-line reading.** The founding Jagwar myth: a feminine maker holding a world on a string makes the Jagwars and teaches them to sing; kings persuade them they can't; she hides the song inside their wings and withdraws; empires cage and sell — until a wise one finds the old cave, remembers she once held the string, and the circle starts to grow again from the inside of the inside. > [!info] Album & credits > **Album:** *33* (2022, Big Loud Rock / Big Loud Records) — **track 10 of 10**, the closer · 3:50 · released 2022-09-30 > **Written by** Roy English (sole) · **Produced by** Roy English & Matt Pauling > **Full lyrics:** [Genius](https://genius.com) · streaming > **▶ Listen:** [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMGmDsjlC_g) This is the song Roy calls *"my favorite song that has ever come through me"* — note *come through me*, not *that I wrote* — and, separately, the first thing a new listener should hear: *"The Circle is Jagwar Twin's Genesis story."* It closes *33*, it is the origin story the whole catalogue is told from, and it is where two of the project's load-bearing symbols — the world on a string and the song hidden in the wings — are both born. It's distinct from the doctrine [[Concepts/The Loop and the Circle]] (the worldview) and from the 2026 reworking [[The Circle (Lucius Version)]] (same name, no myth left in it). It links to both. It is its own page. ## At a glance - **Era / release** — closer of *33* (2022); doctrine named publicly three years earlier (2019); re-sung, hollowed out, as the opener of *Lucius Lullaby* (2026). - **In one line** — a creation myth where the thing everyone's looking for was sealed inside them the whole time, and the cure is remembering, not acquiring. - **Who speaks** — nobody in the cast, quite. It's told in **third-person myth** — no "I," no "you," just *"long ago, there was a Jagwar…"* The narrator is the myth-voice itself; the figures inside it are [[The Wise One]], the Maker, the Jagwars, and the new kings. ([[Sir Lucius]] appears only as the kings and empires; [[Roy]] is the namesake who files himself among the made creatures.) - **Key symbols** — [[The Thread]] (the string) · the song / singing · the wings · the inside of the inside · [[Concepts/The Jaguar]] (the Jagwars) · the cave · the cages · [[Fire]] (by its absence — see below). ## The song, mapped It's a myth in three movements — three four-line verses of narrative, each answered by the doctrine-refrain — and it enacts a circle: creation, loss, recovery, with the instruction repeated past the end of the story. The whole thing runs in third person, cool and folkloric, punctuated by two very human non-lexical breaths (*"Oh!"*, *"(Um!)"*) — the singer audibly present inside his own cosmology, a little warmth against the mythic scale. | Move | In the song | What it does | |---|---|---| | **1 — Creation & immanence** | *"Long ago, there was a Jagwar with a world tied on a string / And she made other Jagwars, then taught them to sing"* · *"she'd walk with the Jagwars"* | A feminine maker makes the Jagwars and gives them **song** — not power, not wealth, not knowledge, *song.* She descends to the empires of *"the Earth, Wind, and the Sea"* and walks among them: immanence, source moving *with* its creatures. | | **Refrain (doctrine)** | *"The circle will grow / From the inside of the inside… But the inside of the inside must be where you go"* | The thesis, stated *before* its story is finished — an **instruction**, not a description. You get the answer before you're shown why you need it. | | **2 — Loss by persuasion & concealment** | *"Many cycles of the story came and went with their kings / And the new kings told Jagwars they never could sing"* · *"the maker of the Jagwars hid the song inside their wings / On the inside of the inside, then left them to sing"* | The loss is **belief, not theft.** Nobody takes the song; across *"many cycles,"* new kings simply convince the Jagwars it was never theirs. The maker's answer is to **hide the song inside them** and withdraw — emanation folding into concealment. | | **Refrain (repeated)** | *"…the inside of the inside must be where you go"* | Now it reads as a reply: since the song was sealed *inside*, inward is the only route back. | | **3 — Degradation & recovery** | *"the empires built cages and sold everything"* · *"'Til a wise one found a small cave where the Jagwars used to sing / And the wise one remembered she once held the string"* | The world falls all the way into capture and commerce — **until** the Wise One walks into the old cave and *remembers.* Resolution by memory: no army, no kingdom seized, no enemy beaten. The largest stakes recovered by the smallest act. | | **Coda — refrain to fade** | *"…must be where you go"* × many, to fade | The doctrine outlasts the narrative. The album's **literal final words** are the instruction, repeated until it dissolves — the point left ringing after the story stops. | Both figures who hold the string are *"she"* — the Maker at the start, the Wise One at the end — so the myth's first and last beats rhyme, and the recursion *"inside of the inside"* points inward exactly as the circle grows outward from that center. ## What it means A few claims that cut across the whole myth. **The creatures are the artist.** They're *Jagwars* — Roy's own spelling, and the point, not a typo. *"Jagwar Twin"* reads as self-identification with these made-and-divided creatures: the ones taught to sing, told they couldn't, carrying a hidden song in their wings. When the Wise One remembers, she is, on one reading, *us* remembering — the Jagwars who were told we couldn't sing, singing again. **The gift is song, and the tragedy is being talked out of it.** The maker hands over neither dominion nor knowledge but the capacity to *sing* — essence, authentic expression, a share in creation. Which sets up the specific cruelty of the loss: the song is never confiscated, the Jagwars are *persuaded it never existed.* Authority here is gained by convincing someone that something inherent is absent — and that is precisely the mechanism the rest of *33* dramatizes on the attention economy ([[Pay Attention (feat. little luna)]], [[I Like to Party]], [[Happy Face]]). The closer names that mechanism at its mythic root, then supplies the antidote. **What's sought is already here — so the journey is remembrance, not acquisition.** *"Hid the song inside their wings, on the inside of the inside."* This is the catalogue's governing paradox stated as plot: the treasure was sealed inside the seeker the whole time. You don't go get it; you remember it. And that reframes the album's central question — [[Soul Is A Star]]'s *"do you know who you are?"* — as something answerable by memory rather than search. **"The inside of the inside" reverses the album's own direction.** Everything before the closer pulls awareness *outward* — toward the feed, the metric, the spectacle. Here the circle grows *"from the inside of the inside,"* outward growth **sourced from the deepest interior.** Same recursive shape as the rest of the record; opposite vector. As the last word of an album about forgetting-by-distraction, it's the mythic cure for its own disease: go in, not further out. (Read it beside [[Imagine A World]], the track that hands off to it — Eden relocated *inside* — and beside [[Welcome to the Circus]], where the identical recursion is run outward and harvested. Circle: inward, self-finding. Circus: outward, self-losing. Same geometry, opposite function.) **Memory beats conquest.** The resolution is the quietest possible: *"the wise one remembered."* No villain defeated, no throne taken. In this world, what's broken is fixed by remembering — never by winning. That's the ethic the whole cosmology turns on, and it's why the figure who saves everything does almost nothing. ## Characters - [[The Wise One]] — the figure the myth resolves on: two lines, total, and then it's over. She finds the cave, remembers she once held the string, and turns the whole story from loss back toward light. Read as **a faculty more than a person** — feminine-coded remembrance — and as holding two faces at once (she *was* the Maker; she's also the template any of us can instantiate). The deep version is under *Advanced reading* below. - **The Maker** — the feminine primordial Jagwar who ties the world on the string, teaches the song, walks with the Jagwars, then hides the song in their wings and withdraws. *"She."* On the cosmic reading she and the Wise One are two phases of one being. - [[Concepts/The Jaguar]] — the Jagwars themselves: the made creatures who share the project's name, taught to sing, told they couldn't, carrying the song in their wings. - **The new kings** — the antagonists, present across *"many cycles"*: the masculine system-of-control who *"told Jagwars they never could sing"* and *"built cages and sold everything."* The mechanism of forgetting. - [[Mary]] — the catalogue's divine-feminine figure; archetypal overlap with the Maker/Wise-One (the Sophia/Shekhinah register), **not** a naming — the Wise One is not "Mary," and the myth doesn't say she is. - [[Roy]] — the namesake who identifies with the made creatures; sole writer of the song. - [[Jagwar Twin]] — the project named for the myth's made-and-divided creatures. - [[Sir Lucius]] — present only in the *"empires"* and the *"kings"* who persuade the Jagwars they can't sing; later re-sings the myth, distorted, as the [[The Circle (Lucius Version)|Lucius Version]]. ## Artifacts **ROY POEM WALKING THE EDGE OF A KNIFE** · `INSIDE OF THE INSIDE` — The unlock code INSIDE OF THE INSIDE is verbatim the repeated refrain of The Circle ("the inside of the inside must be where you go"), and the poem's line "turn back the stone / From the inside" restates the… → [[Artifacts - Drawings and Sketches|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xe858c547827aba7438709a166b469d26170394ba55ffbf865b0ebecea03f3c6a..png"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xe858c547827aba7438709a166b469d26170394ba55ffbf865b0ebecea03f3c6a..png" width="200"></a> **BLINKING (2/2)** · `C876` — The poem's regress behind the music that "plays every song" (Fiddle → Strings → Player → Symphony Master) resolving into "It's just you inside yourself" mirrors The Circle's string-holder cosmology ("a Jagwa… → [[Artifacts - Concept Images and Emblems|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x211f837e4e8c6dd9e52ff46681309dc5a967ebadfe76999837fa08c9d2e3c4bd..png"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x211f837e4e8c6dd9e52ff46681309dc5a967ebadfe76999837fa08c9d2e3c4bd..png" width="200"></a> **CAUTION, ALL KINGS END** · `CAKE` — The artifact's thesis is the lyric: "Many cycles of the story came and went with their kings / And the new kings told Jagwars they never could sing" — the crown-and-serpent tableau images those cycles of end… → [[Artifacts - Concept Images and Emblems|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x29c72dbd4ba375457faa384e87e584f5362540b5b955121f4c43e2513739729d..jpg"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x29c72dbd4ba375457faa384e87e584f5362540b5b955121f4c43e2513739729d..jpg" width="200"></a> **THE TRUTH IS A SPHERE** · `ENLIGHTENED BEING` — The diagram is the refrain's geometry made literal: concentric circles whose innermost point is the Universal Self, with arrows running the radius, matching "The circle will grow / From the inside of the ins… → [[Artifacts - Concept Images and Emblems|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x1b7d38676a6aaf1756b914985f67f995806a719e38f4e6f81a9b598b1eaf2b91..jpg"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x1b7d38676a6aaf1756b914985f67f995806a719e38f4e6f81a9b598b1eaf2b91..jpg" width="200"></a> **ROY UNIDENTIFIED SKETCH** · `KEM` — The face's caption "Inside of the inside" is verbatim from The Circle's refrain ("From the inside of the inside / But the inside of the inside must be where you go"), making the drawing a literal illustratio… → [[Artifacts - Drawings and Sketches|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x2da3b5d407a32ab61b91199bb55c7844f91e2b0a7f5c39bbd6227e233792b24d..jpeg"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x2da3b5d407a32ab61b91199bb55c7844f91e2b0a7f5c39bbd6227e233792b24d..jpeg" width="200"></a> **DAVID STAR** · `TWISTED LADDER` — The poem's engine is identical to The Circle's doctrine: a divine spark hidden inside creation must remember and ascend back to the source (tikkun) — the sparks climbing the twisted ladder to become constell… → [[Artifacts - Drawings and Sketches|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x37cd1eeaaf9f8bd4b8e21ee77773176d3e592551063d473f6a3c4f9cc763b39e..png"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x37cd1eeaaf9f8bd4b8e21ee77773176d3e592551063d473f6a3c4f9cc763b39e..png" width="200"></a> **THE CIRCLE** · `THE GREAT JAGWAR` — This is the MINT BURIED song-mint of 'The Circle' (33 closer, minted 02-10-23), and its unlock code 'THE GREAT JAGWAR' names the song's feminine maker-Jagwar who holds the world on a string — the tie is defi… → [[Artifacts - Songs, Demos and Mints|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <video src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xac9f2eb2401875e22837d494811b38df27d81045fb7d66466e68768f781ef4d5..mp4" poster="https://plumcreekranch.com/jagwar/artifacts/141.png" width="240" controls preload="none"></video> ## Symbols - [[The Thread]] — **originates here.** *"A world tied on a string"* (Maker) and *"she once held the string"* (Wise One) are the same filament: the living connection to the source — feeling, agency, the song. Ariadne's line back out through the maze of cages and empires. There's an ethics baked in: the Wise One *remembers holding* the string, which is the opposite of *pulling* strings. **Remembrance holds the string; control pulls strings.** - **The song / singing** — the gift; essence rendered as a verb. Ties to Roy's *"there's only one song"* (see *Advanced reading*): the one primordial song, hidden in the wings, that the catalogue keeps trying to re-transmit. - **The wings** — where the song is kept: the interior, the self, *"on the inside of the inside."* - **The inside of the inside** — the recursive deepest interior; the only route back; the reversed attention-vector. The album's closing instruction. - **The cave** (*"a small cave where the Jagwars used to sing"*) — memory, sacred space, the origin point; and, read against Plato, an *inversion* — here the cave holds the **truth**, not the shadows. - **The cages** (*"the empires built cages and sold everything"*) — capture and commodification; the caged performer, the same tent as the [[Concepts/The Circus|Circus]]. - [[Fire]] — present **by its absence.** The maker descends to *"the Earth, Wind, and the Sea"* — three elements, no fire — which is essentially *Earth, Wind & Fire* (a named childhood influence of Roy's) with Fire swapped for Sea. Tempting; also negative evidence, i.e. the cheapest kind. Held as a curio, not built on (see below). ## Connected songs - [[The Circle (Lucius Version)]] — the 2026 reworking; the closer-of-*33* becomes the **opener** of *Lucius Lullaby.* Same sacred name, none of the myth. The cleanest closer-to-opener hinge in the catalogue, and the sharpest way to see what this song *is* — by watching it get switched off. - [[Another Way II Heaven]] — the companion cosmology, and Roy's other solo mythic statement on *33* (Roy-alone write, both produce). *"One, become Two"* meets *"she made other Jagwars"*; both are **descent-and-withdrawal** cosmologies. - [[Welcome to the Circus]] — the same recursive circle run **outward** as spectacle; *"ring of fire, no escaping"*; the cages-and-selling empires. The Circle weaponized. - [[Not Your Homie]] — the Circle's **communal chant-form appropriated by the plague-voice**: ring-around-the-rosie — the most communal children's circle-game there is, a ring of held hands — turned into a plague-march (*"Ashes, ashes, we all fall down"*). The Circle's own freely-given gesture commandeered as the commanded, harvested echo. - [[Move To You]] — the Circle's **earliest naming** (2019), three years before this closer; the tender song where the doctrine is first spoken aloud, and the exact song [[Sir Lucius|Lucius]] later tries to bury. - [[Imagine A World]] — the capstone-before-the-closer that hands off to it; *"what's sought externally, found within."* - [[Soul Is A Star]] — poses the album's central question (*"do you know who you are?"*) that The Circle answers at the close; the *"secret in the circle"*; a Joni Mitchell co-write. - [[Happy Face]] · [[Pay Attention (feat. little luna)]] · [[I Like to Party]] — the attention/spectacle tracks that dramatize *"told Jagwars they never could sing"* and *"sold everything."* The Circle is their mythic cure. ## Paratext — how Roy frames it Roy has said more about this song, and more emphatically, than almost anything else in the catalogue, and it's worth collecting because it moves several readings from *inferred* to *anchored*: - **His single strongest favorite statement anywhere:** *"It's my favorite song that has ever come through me"* (Ones To Watch, 2022). - **The front door:** asked what a new listener should hear first, *"The Circle is Jagwar Twin's Genesis story"* (Audio Addiction, 2024). - **Favorite to play live** (Strife, 2024). - **On writing it:** *"It seemed to write itself… The mind had very little to do with it, and I just got out of the way"* (Alternative Press, 2023) — continuous with his long-standing "download" account of his process, and the reason he says *came through me.* - **The collective reading, in his own words:** around the 2023 reimaginings, the song *"feels like the story of Jagwar Twin but, in many ways, the story of all of us."* This is the public grounding for reading the Wise One as *all of us* remembering — no longer only an inference. **Two related releases.** *The Circle: The Great Jagwar Myth* — a four-track EP (2023-02-17, Big Loud Rock) of three reimagined *"angles"* of the song; Roy: *"I hope with the reimagined 'angles' of the song that everyone can find their own 'home' in one of the spaces."* And a stripped **live acoustic video** (Nov 2022), part of the *33* rollout, sibling to the *Online* acoustic filmed in Joshua Tree. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the doctrine predates the song by three years (convergence, not construction) > The Circle isn't late scaffolding retrofitted onto the catalogue. Roy named it as a *worldview* at his very first press cycle, in 2019, talking about [[Move To You]]: *"There is no beginning and no end — it's just a circle."* That's three years before "The Circle" existed as a song, attached to the most vulnerable track on the debut. So the 2022 closer doesn't *invent* the doctrine — it **formalizes and mythologizes** a frame Roy was already using. > > Trace it further and two of the project's principal forces turn out to have slow-emergence timelines that converge on 2026 from opposite directions: the Circle is *named* in 2019, becomes the keystone song in 2022, and is re-sung distorted in 2026; the Lucius/Loop line reaches back to a 2008 mirror-self credit and is fully billed as antagonist by 2026. Two forces, two decades, arriving at the same year. The right word is **convergence, not construction** — the mythology grew toward itself rather than being assembled to order. (The buried irony: the cosmology's origin song, *Move To You*, is the exact one Lucius later singles out to inter — *"does anyone remember Move To You?"* The deepest worldview is anchored to the song the mind keeps trying to throw away.) > [!note]- Advanced reading — the two faces of the Wise One (the core frame) > The resolution figure carries two faces at once, joined at a single hinge. > > **Face one — cosmic / source.** *"She remembered she once held the string"* — but the *Maker* held the string at the opening. If the Wise One once held it, then on this reading she *was* the Maker: seeker and maker are two phases of one feminine being, who made the world, was forgotten, and returns at the end to remember herself. This is the divine-feminine face, the territory the archive maps to **Sophia / Shekhinah** — wisdom recovering the thread, the source returning from exile. (The *"she"* is grounded; the Sophia/Shekhinah identification is interpretation — a family resemblance, not an equation, and it leans further from conventional *Mary* than the overlap first suggests, since her defining act is *remembrance.*) > > **Face two — immanent / collective.** But the song was hidden inside *every* Jagwar's wings. So the Wise One is also the **template** of remembrance any one of us can instantiate — not a specific being but *us, remembering.* This is the Christ-as-exemplar pattern (the ones who remembered the song and sang it back — a Jesus, a Bowie, a Prince), tied quietly to the album title, **33**, Christ's age. Roy grounds this face in his own public words: *"Every person has it inside of them. The trick is getting it inside out"*; *"If it's happening for me it's happening for everyone."* And it has an in-album seed — the [[Superhuman (Interlude)]] passage borrowed from Chaplin's *Great Dictator* (*"the kingdom of God is within man / not in one man / nor a group of men / but in all men / in you"*) is the exact theology of the "all of us" template. > > **Both at once**, via one hinge: the spark inside each person, *remembered,* reunites with the source — so personal awakening and reunion with the cosmic Maker are *the same event.* You don't pick a face. The Wise One is the place where *"I woke up"* and *"the source returned"* turn out to be one sentence. (The 33 = Christ's-age tie is held lightly — a resonance, not a locked claim.) > [!note]- Advanced reading — one feminine function at three points of the cycle > Step back and the myth is **bracketed by two feminine figures holding the same object** — it opens on a feminine Maker with the world on a string and closes on a feminine Wise One who remembers holding it. Read against [[The Thread]] (the thread = feeling, the song, the animating principle), the whole cosmogony resolves into one image: **the feminine holds the thread; the "new kings" cut it; recovery is re-membering it.** The kings are the masculine system-of-control — cages, commodification, *"you can't sing"* — mind divorced from heart at *civilizational* scale, the same severance [[Sir Lucius]] performs at the personal one. > > So the divine feminine ([[Mary]] / Shekhinah, the Wise One, the primordial Jaguar) reads as **one function seen at three phases** — *origin* (the Maker who ties the world on the string and teaches the song), *exile* (the hidden source inside the darkened world — Shekhinah-in-exile), and *return* (the Wise One who re-members). The guardrail is **archetypal continuity, not identification:** this is not a claim the three are one named character, and the Wise One is not a fourth roster figure standing beside Roy, Lucius, and Mary. Who, if anyone, *is* the Maker stays genuinely open. > [!note]- Advanced reading — descent-and-withdrawal (tzimtzum), and the inverted cave > The Maker *"comes down"* and *"walks with"* (immanence), then *"hid the song inside their wings… then left them to sing"* (withdrawal). Emanation folding into concealment-and-retreat — the same shape as [[Another Way II Heaven]], and structurally the shape Lurianic Kabbalah calls **tzimtzum**: the maker contracts, leaving the divine concealed *within* creation, recoverable by reintegration (*tikkun* — which is the Wise One's remembrance beat, the scattered light gathered back). The inward-hiding is *why* "the inside of the inside" is the only route back: the song was sealed in, so in is the only way out. The song concealed *inside* rather than acquired from outside is also the **kingdom within** (Luke 17:21) — the essential thing uncovered, not obtained. > > The **cave** takes the same inverting move. *"A small cave where the Jagwars used to sing"* is, read against Plato, a cave that holds the **truth** — the original, now-forgotten song — not shadows mistaken for it. The Wise One goes *in* to recover an original relation, not to be deceived inside it. Eden remembered, rather than the fall into illusion. Whether the cave is best read as memory, sacred space, the unconscious, or the origin point stays open; the *direction* is clear — she goes in to find what's real. (Framework correspondences, licensed by Roy's open engagement with these traditions, not claims the song makes outright.) > [!note]- Advanced reading — "there's only one song," and the crowd that sings it back > Roy's Manifesto FAQ states the spine: *"The world needs music, but the world doesn't need more songs. There's only one song. I'm still learning how to write it."* Read through the Circle, the *one song* is the primordial song the Maker hid in the wings and the kings suppressed — and the catalogue is successive attempts to re-transmit it. The Wise One's remembrance is *how* it's recovered: not writing a new song, **re-membering the only one.** His public line *"Music is how the world remembers who it is"* is that mechanism in his own words. > > And it has an audible, communal form: when a crowd sings the song back at a show, *that is the Jagwars singing again* — the suppressed song recovered in real time, by people who turn out to have known it all along (it was *"inside their wings,"* inside them). The Wise One's private cave-moment scaled to a room: **anamnesis with a chorus.** It's the Circle's signature gesture and its cleanest line against the Loop — communion you can't stream-count. Its exact mirror is the [[Concepts/The Circus|Circus]], the same crowd energy pointed outward and harvested; and the dark pole is literalized in the Lucius Version, where voices are *engineered* to sound like one — unison passed off as communion. (One honest note: the precise 2019 sentence pairing the Circle with *"the crowd singing it back"* is still pending a clean full-text; the gesture itself stands on the released material independently.) > [!note]- Advanced reading — the Lucius Version: appropriation, not deletion (the savage joke) > *Lucius Lullaby* (2026) opens on a Track 1 titled **"The Circle (Lucius Version)"** — same sacred name, the genesis myth's front door — except the myth isn't in it. Not one line of it. The track wears the title and carries a single looped phrase from a music box: *"It's a beautiful life, it's a beautiful life, I'm dreaming"* — which isn't from *33* at all; it's the refrain of the *next* track. The name of The Circle, filled with the Lullaby's words. A bait-and-switch, not a cover. > > This is the album-level punchline, and it's darker than a straight inversion. [[Sir Lucius]] doesn't *argue* that the Circle is false. He keeps the comforting name and swaps the awakening-song for a lullaby — so *"remembered she once held the string"* gets overwritten by *"I'm dreaming,"* and the remembrance-figure is put back to sleep with perfect efficiency. **He wins not by convincing anyone the Circle is wrong, but by convincing them they've already found it — then handing them a music box.** The audience enters Lucius through *comfort,* not corruption, which is worse. Four precise inversions stack up: awakening → **dreaming** (*"I'm asleep"* would break the spell; *"I'm dreaming"* feels magical, so the swap goes unnoticed — sleep mistaking itself for waking); depth → **platitude** (*"it's a beautiful life"*); circle → **Loop** (the living shape becomes a wind-up mechanism, cranked from outside, going nowhere); many voices → **one surface** (per the credits it's *not* instrumental — *"sir lucius"* and *"ROY"* are two credited vocalists, plus background voices layered to sound like one unless you listen closely). > > Even the *form* does the work. A music box is a credited instrument here — Roy plays a literal *"Music Box"* — and a music box is, mechanically, *a string-instrument with the strings replaced by a fixed mechanism,* a comb plucking a pinned cylinder. So the track renders [[The Thread]] — feeling, *held* in a living hand — as clockwork you *wind up.* *"Mind divorced from heart,"* enacted in the medium itself. The album opens *inside* the corrupted Circle, and the un-distorted doctrine is absent from the record — present only by its violation. (A full side-by-side of the two versions is flagged as analytically essential and not yet written.) > [!note]- Advanced reading — the object-level puns (held below the line) > Two curios the archive keeps *and* keeps honest about, because both are the cheap kind of evidence: > > **Earth, Wind — and no Fire.** The Maker descends to *"the empires of the Earth, Wind, and the Sea"* — three elements, and the missing fourth is *fire.* Earth, Wind & Fire is on Roy's named childhood-influence list, so the lyric is effectively the band name with **Fire → Sea.** Tempting — but it's *negative evidence,* reading meaning into what's absent, and the swap may be pure euphony (*Sea / sing* live in the same rhyme-field). Kept as a curio; the over-read risk is the lesson, not the fire. > > **33⅓.** The album's closing line is *"the inside of the inside must be where you go"* — and 33⅓ rpm is the speed of a vinyl LP, which plays *outside-in,* the stylus spiraling toward the innermost groove. So on a record, the closer's instruction is *literally* where the needle sits during the song: the closing line enacting its own medium, on an album called *33.* A genuinely lovely coincidence — held below the line only because a confirmed *33* vinyl pressing hasn't been verified, and without the object the pun has nothing to sit the needle on. > > A tone counterweight, in Roy's own voice: he frames the neighboring track *Online* as *"so fun and so ridiculous"* and says he tries to *"take things less seriously… just trying to have fun."* *33* is not joyless doctrine — even as The Circle is its solemn mythic core, the record around it is grinning. ## Lyrics ``` Long ago, there was a Jagwar with a world tied on a string And she made other Jagwars, then taught them to sing She would come down to the empires of the Earth, Wind, and the Sea And she'd walk with the Jagwars, this song they would sing Oh! The circle will grow From the inside of the Inside The circle will grow Oh! The circle will grow But the inside of the inside must be where you go (Um!) Many cycles of the story came and went with their kings And the new kings told Jagwars they never could sing So the maker of the Jagwars hid the song inside their wings On the inside of the inside, then left them to sing Oh! The circle will grow From the inside of the inside The circle will grow Oh! The circle will grow But the inside of the inside must be where you go Well, the Earth changed, and the sky raged for the Jagwars on the string And the empires built cages and sold everything 'Til a wise one found a small cave where the Jagwars used to sing And the wise one remembered she once held the string Oh! The circle will grow From the inside of the inside The circle will grow Oh! The circle will grow But the inside of the inside must be where you go Oh! The circle will grow From the inside of the inside The circle will grow Oh! The circle will grow But the inside of the inside must be where you go But the inside of the inside must be where you go But the inside of the inside must be where you go ``` ## Source notes **Grounded (Roy's own words, released music, public posts).** "The Circle" is track 10 (the closer) of *33* (2022, Big Loud Rock), 3:50, released 2022-09-30; **Roy English is the sole writer**, Roy and Matt Pauling produce (Spotify Credits, verified). The lyric is Spotify-verified: the feminine Maker with *"a world tied on a string"* who *"made other Jagwars, then taught them to sing"* and walked with them; the *"new kings"* who *"told Jagwars they never could sing"*; the maker who *"hid the song inside their wings, on the inside of the inside"*; *"the empires built cages and sold everything"*; the Wise One who *"found a small cave"* and *"remembered she once held the string"*; the doctrine-refrain to fade. Both Maker and Wise One are *"she."* Roy's paratext is public: *"my favorite song that has ever come through me"* (2022); *"Jagwar Twin's Genesis story"* (2024); favorite live song (2024); *"it seemed to write itself"* (2023); the *"story of all of us"* framing (2023); the *"angles"/"home"* line for the reimaginings (2023). The doctrine's 2019 naming (*"there is no beginning and no end — it's just a circle"*), the *"there's only one song"* Manifesto line, and the collective-face aphorisms are all his own public words. Related releases: the *The Circle: The Great Jagwar Myth* EP (2023-02-17) and the Nov 2022 live acoustic video. **Strong readings (interpretation on grounded anchors).** The Jagwars as Roy's namesake (self-identification with the made creatures); song-as-essence and loss-as-persuasion; remembrance-not-acquisition as the governing paradox; "inside of the inside" as the reversed attention-vector and the album's cure; the string as [[The Thread]], originating here, with the held-string-vs-pulled-string ethics; the Wise One's two faces and the *faculty-not-figure* reading; the crowd-sings-it-back as the Circle's signature; the Lucius Version as appropriation-not-deletion. Unusually well-anchored for framework material — Roy's solo write, naming the project's own creatures, and the documented public source of the *"song hidden inside its wings"* phrasing — but interpretation nonetheless. **Framework (esoteric, syncretic — not authorial intent).** The tzimtzum/tikkun withdrawal-and-return shape; the *kingdom within*; the inverted Plato's cave; the one-function-at-three-phases reading of the divine feminine (Sophia/Shekhinah); the 33 = Christ's-age resonance. Licensed by Roy's open engagement with these traditions; the song never asserts them as method. **Held below the line.** The Earth-Wind-&-Fire and 33⅓-rpm curios (both flagged as low-grade evidence — an absence and an unverified vinyl gate, respectively). **How we'd be wrong.** The strongest counter-case reads the song as a self-contained, bizarrely beautiful fable closer, and asks whether the Thread / tzimtzum / Sophia architecture — and the 33↔*Lucius Lullaby* closer-to-opener hinge — is pattern-hunting across releases four years apart, and whether the read survives for a listener who didn't already know the 2022 doctrine. The verdict is held at strong-interpretation, not dropped. *This page draws only on released music, public interviews and posts, and official videos. No private material was used.* ## Read next - [[The Wise One]] — the two lines the whole cosmology resolves on. - [[Concepts/The Loop and the Circle]] — the doctrine this song is the fullest statement of, and its dark twin. - [[The Thread]] — the string the Maker tied the world to, and the Wise One remembered holding. - [[The Circle (Lucius Version)]] — same name, no myth left; watch the song get switched off. - [[Another Way II Heaven]] — the companion creation myth on *33.* - [[33]] — the album this closes: from forgetting to remembrance, in ten tracks.