Vocabulary in Phaedo

This doctrine is called anamnesis and is widely attributed to Plato. The principle of anamnesis holds that each moment of education, illumination, or knowledge is a moment of recollection. Each human is born with all the knowledge she will ever need already latent in her soul. The process of education is a steady unveiling of ever deeper layers of inner knowledge as each revelation is drawn out of the dark wells of forgetting.

A "thyrsus" was a staff of fennel topped with a pinecone, representing fertility and associated with Dionysus, the god of hedonism. The larger point here is that there are many who stand adjacent to true knowledge, perhaps bearing such ceremonial displays as the thyrsus, but "few are the mystics[...] the true philosophers."