The ache of Dionysos
For the cost of a plane ticket, I, too, could have my very own Greek tragedy
Once upon a time, I bought a 13th lunar mansion talisman for erotic love. It was during the summer of 2021, when the world was just beginning to unthaw from pandemic freeze. After more than a year of celibacy, living in isolation, and awkwardly chaste little socially distanced Jane Austen dates, I was cautiously optimistic that the wheel of romantic fortune would swing back up for me again.
That’s not exactly unusual for me, though. I’ve been optimistic all my life in spite of the evidence. Every year on January 1st when I commit to paper my goals and dreams for that year, this elusive project, the one thing in life I can’t systematically tackle like a business plan or wellness routine, ends up near the top of the list. I usually tweak the wording of it, but the idea is always the same. I wanted a mad kind of love, a full body and mind sensation type of love, the kind you need to believe exists when both your Lot of Eros and your 7th house ruler Mars fall in the last decan of Pisces.1 Once, twice, maybe three times, I thought I’d gotten there, but hindsight always informed me that I actually hadn’t — not entirely, not quite. In 2022 and 2023, love was conspicuously absent from my list. In 2024, I didn’t make a list at all.
I do remember that the dating pool had piss in it during those years, but I don’t remember what exactly moved me to surrender my goal. Probably somewhere in that process, my mind relented to the distinction between a desire and an objective. There was also the small matter of developing a life-changing chronic illness and having to scrap all my carefully laid plans to go live with my parents. At that point, the only “goal” that really mattered was getting better. Dynamic disability is such that for the last couple years, I haven’t dared to plan more than a couple months ahead at a time. A not insignificant part of my curriculum was to embrace the chaos and trust that I really don’t know what comes next, no matter how closely I can approximate it with all my sophisticated divinatory instruments.
Somehow, I managed to eke out five weeks of travel in the summer of 2023. In retrospect, I was seriously struggling with my mobility, but in that moment, it was a lifeline and a taste of vibrancy that helped balance out the bland suck factor of recovery. I already had plans to spend June and early July in Portugal, so that was kind of how I ended up in Crete during the summer solstice, at a retreat led by my friends Sabrina Monarch and Karla Palomino.2 My birthday wish that year was to honor the death process of multiple big chapters in my life winding down through ceremony and ritual. I’d even envisioned doing this in Portugal or Greece. So when they announced that they were holding a “Dionysian mythopoetic ritual experience”3 so close to my birthday, I knew it was kismet, and I knew I had to be there.
The talisman I bought once upon a time, the ring that never quite fit on Cinderella’s finger or woke up Sleeping Beauty, came with me on that trip as an offering. We were asked to bring symbolically meaningful things to leave on the altar for the duration of the retreat, but by the end, it felt more appropriate to leave the talisman behind as an offering to the land. The surrender was the point.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the talisman sent me an email the next day. Not even 24 hours after I’d left the retreat, the seller’s website glitched and sent me a duplicate shipping notification for the same talisman I’d bought two years prior. I found out later that other people had received dupe shipping notifications too, but the specificity and the timing of it sent chills all the way down my spine. That wasn’t the first time it had taken on a life of its own: once, during a hot NYC summer at the very moment when I was ruminating over a crush, the talisman somehow defied physics and leapt off my (completely intact) necklace chain and onto the subway floor. Like a fuckboy from Brooklyn, it once tried to ghost me, and now it was sliding back into my DMs after I decided to move on. Maybe not materially, but in theory, it was on its way back to me. I wasn’t sure whether to take that as a promise or a threat.
Greece did have another mindfuck in store for me, it turned out. I spent the first part of 2024 emerging from chronic illness/Florida suburb jail and gradually testing the waters of my partial recovery, aka traveling more. This was a celebration and it led me through the Balkan peninsula all summer, through the various lands of former Yugoslavia and at last delivering me to the heat-choked idleness of Athens in August, when the locals are away and tourists don’t bother.
It’s almost a cliche to hear people say stuff like the land is alive in Greece and so are its myths, but it’s honestly true. Call it an egregore, a collective thoughtform made strong by culture, or call it a sentient field made up of the various godforms of the ancient Greek pantheon. Either way, it acts upon you.
It was almost as though the lessons and metaphors of Crete were just a primer for what I was about to experience, the practicum of eros and ecstasy and labyrinths and loss. And it began pretty much the moment my feet touched Greek soil again.
I should back up for a moment, because there’s more context, and the context is that I came here with a suitcase weighed with expectations and data points. Earlier that year, I thought I’d seen my own wedding chart, or at least had a strong premonition around it based on the way multiple transits were hitting my chart at once in 2025: namely, my nodal return, Saturn entering my 7th, and Jupiter entering my 10th, bringer of public ceremonies. Both Saturn and Jupiter were perched right on my angles in my solar return chart. This was also supported by the fact that I was in the tail end of a period of felicity,4 I was about to start a potent level 2 peak from eros in my zodiacal releasing at the end of the summer,5 progressed Venus would finally reach the degree of my midheaven, I’d have my 7th house ruler profected at that point,6 and my solar return chart for that year looked, well, relationship-y. On top of that, the Aries north node eclipses were all over my 7th house and would eventually start lighting up Pisces, where my 7th house ruler, Lot of Eros, and Lot of Union are. See, that’s not delusion — that’s called technique.
Not one, but two other astrologers had also independently come to the same conclusion during my previous two birthday readings. Earlier that spring, a psychic confirmed that love was in my near future, and that she didn’t see me staying in the US for much longer. The astrologer I’d just consulted about my solar return the month prior made a pretty good case for why a new relationship seemed imminent, and that I’d likely meet someone in July or August.
I had actually matched with Aeneas7 in a different country, at the beginning of the summer when I was just starting my travels. I wasn’t there for very long and we never had a chance to meet up, but he would be back in Greece for the month visiting family in August, and he volunteered to be my Athens city guide. When we finally met in person, we went on three dates over the span of three consecutive days, a lightning round of city skyline walks, PDA, beach languishing, and outdoor cinema.
Earlier that week, I remember noticing that I’d be peaking on fortune, eros, and spirit8 on those days, and I wondered if something interesting would happen. Still, I wasn’t about to make it mean something prematurely — at least not after the first date ended, and I was feeling tentatively impressed that he seemed to have a lot of the qualities I was looking for in a long-term partner. But then I dreamed about him that night. In the dream, we were in a house, and I was a guest, and he was tucking me in at night and making sure I was comfortable before retiring to his own room. Early the next morning in real life, I met him by the subway station and he drove me to his family’s (empty at the moment) house by the beach an hour outside of the city. When we pulled up, I told him that I felt pretty sure this house was the house in my dream. We swam in the ocean and went back to the house to have sex and lay in the grass discussing politics. By the time I caught him getting misty-eyed as Holly reunited with Cat at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I was finding it harder to not feel invested in the potential of my prophecy coming to life.
Aside from a couple days where he had to go out of town for a job, we didn’t really go more than a day without seeing each other. I was feeling tended to and over-the-top horny and also privately not at ease when we weren’t together, which should have been my first clue. I couldn’t sleep with him beside me, and he wasn’t a big texter, and I was so battle-scarred from my years in the trenches of dating New York City men that I found a small part of myself waiting for the other shoe to drop every time we went our separate ways. The first time I spiraled a little was after he went away and changed his location on Hinge. We’d only just met three days ago, so like, sure, but it did adjust my expectations somewhat. Then I pulled some tarot cards that confused me and gave me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. In hindsight, they were telling me loud and clear that this man was emotionally unavailable. The only thing confusing about it was that it contradicted what I thought was happening at that point. But he kept making plans to see me, and he held my hand everywhere in public, and he read a bunch of my writing and gazed deeply into my eyes, and at the end of the day, I managed to compartmentalize my insecurities. I was having way more fun than I wasn’t.
There were a lot of things I liked about him. He was conscientious, principled, not just creative but talented and gentle, and he made me feel like a princess with the way he was so attentive to my comfort. The sex was also next-level. Every way he touched me was somehow the platonic ideal of touch. I was starting to name something that had been on the tip of my tongue for a while, which is that there’s a difference between sex that’s erotic and sex that’s mechanical, and this was giving me new words to explain what I mean by “sex that’s erotic.” Mars and Jupiter were conjoining on my Venus, and I was ovulating — a diabolical combination. He proposed more sexual adventures to me, like waking up at sunrise so we could have the beach to ourselves. It would be, in his words, a Dionysian fuck. I was enthralled with this suggestion, and with the god of revelry’s wink to me that this was all part of the plan, a continuation of the thread.
In private, I was becoming ever so slightly unhinged. One of the more surprising predictions I’d received on my birthday was that it looked like I was moving abroad to be with someone (yay), but that the impetus for doing so was an oopsie pregnancy (oh…?). I would have probably dismissed it out of hand if the person telling me this didn’t have a pretty impressive track record of predicting unplanned pregnancies, and though I remained more skeptical of this part of the prophecy — after all, it would require two birth control methods to fail — I started to see confirmation everywhere I looked for it.
There were the aspects of my solar return chart that tipped off the other astrologer, and I was also suddenly looking at Jupiter conjoining my Venus9 in a new way. Venus rules my Ascendant, and I was in a 1st house year. Yeah, actually, a surprise pregnancy might kind of make sense with Saturn, lord of my 5th, conjoining my North Node and Uranus stationing on my Jupiter, 6th lord, all through August and September. Come to think of it, I have Mars (L7) square my Saturn-Uranus conjunction — it’s giving “shotgun wedding,” I fear. And my Saturn-Uranus Ascendant line runs directly through Greece. Is that what this has been about this entire time?
I did my best to keep one foot firmly tethered to planet earth while the other paddled through the realm of prophecy. Earlier into my stay in Athens, I’d spent an afternoon with a Turkish woman learning to read coffee grounds, and she’d scried babies and bulls in my cup. Maybe it’ll be a Taurus, she laughed. At that time, the idea of getting pregnant was still filed away in the folder of “things that were kind of fun to think about,” but I was starting to feel slightly freaked out that Taurus Season was exactly 9 months away. Also, a big wildcard of a full moon was days away from ballooning in my 5th house of children. The mutable T-square of August pitted the benefic and malefic planets against each other as they ganged up on my Venus, a real “fuck around find out” of pleasure and unintended consequences. The upcoming eclipses fell in my 6th and 1st, which also counted as my 9th and 4th from my sect light — body things and international move things all in one. Oh, and that September monthly revolution was looking real “dropping a bombshell.”
I think the thing that surprised me the most about receiving this prediction is that initially, I was more excited than freaked out. For most of my life I’d been extremely ambivalent about having children, and my burgeoning desire for them was a very recent and uncertain development. And truthfully, honestly, a part of me liked the idea of having fate take this enormous decision out of my hands and have it all work out for the best, as so many diviners suggested it would. With the first hit of my nodal return imminent that September, I mused about the fact that my mom and I shared the same lunar nodes, and that she, too, had immigrated to a new country 8 months pregnant. Maybe we belonged to the same lineage of traveling women.
In that moment, though, it was starting to feel more real, and so were all the reasons why getting knocked up by someone you just met is usually a terrible idea. My subtler, more garden-variety insecurities were now compounded by insane fantasies about our future life together, which of course also rested on the precarious assumption that I wouldn’t be raising that baby alone. I imagined the glow of the initial honeymoon worn thin and easily ruptured without a solid foundation of love and trust beneath it. I imagined my future as a scorned wife that he cheated on frequently with the gorgeous models that posed topless for his camera. I’m not someone who gets jealous easily or feels threatened by other women, but I felt threatened by the women in his portfolio. Like I said, insane!
So I did what any well-adjusted person would do when they’re emotionally spiraling over their own future-tripping, and I pulled some tarot cards. Is this guy gonna get me pregnant or not? I intoned. Bitch, he probably already did! they snapped back.
On August 15, with Athens even more idle than before as Greeks congregated with their families to celebrate the Feast of the Dormition of Virgin Mary, I revealed to him the prophecy of my own immaculate conception. At that point, it seemed unfair to withhold information from him that could potentially change his life forever too. He was skeptical that my birth control would fail, but he didn’t dismiss it either. He was one of the rarer straight men I’d met who got into astrology on his own to figure out who he was after a breakup, and not because a woman dragged him into it reluctantly. He assured me that we’d be more careful.
In this moment, I was Ariadne conspiring with Theseus to defeat the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth. Except in this version, the labyrinth was entirely of Ariadne’s making, and the Minotaur was the monstrous result of “wrong” and “right” timelines colliding under unholy scrutiny. At this point in the story, Ariadne had not yet predicted that she would soon be watching Theseus’ white sail disappear into the horizon as she wept on the shores of Naxos.
On the night of the Full Moon in Aquarius, the other shoe dropped. I’d brought my stuff to his apartment so we could leave early the next morning for our Dionysian fuck on the beach. We then went out to get some food, and as we started in our appetizers, he started thanking me for our time together. It turned out his family needed him to come to the island a couple days sooner than planned, he explained, so this would actually be our last night together. He said a lot of seemingly nice-sounding things, but I didn’t hear or remember most of it because I was crashing out internally. He’s not coming. The person you’ve been waiting for hasn’t shown up yet, not even under these very ripe conditions, because he probably never will. That’s the type of thing that happens to other people, not to people like you.
The night before, he’d revealed to me over wine that he experienced a lot of stress when he was younger due to people needing things from him, the expectations of his family. So now, in middle age, he’d set up his life to be as frictionless as possible, to minimize the ways that stress might reach him. I remember thinking that it didn’t sound like there was much room in his life for other people, let alone a child.
Now, confronted by my thousand-yard stare, he explained that he wasn’t in the right place for a relationship, which was news to me because his dating profile said otherwise. It would be too hard for him to give another person his undivided attention while he was in between cities, and he can’t do long distance. He just can’t. All of those seemed like good enough reasons and were probably mostly true, except for the fact that I was willing to return for the right person, and he was a man. At my big age, I’ve come to be a pretty big believer in “if he wanted to, he would.” When I left Portugal last summer, I had an invitation from my lover to visit him in Brazil and sincere promises to stay in touch that he made good on. I wasn’t even looking for commitment at that point so much as I was looking for continuity, and it was evident that he didn’t care to continue.
I was such a big girl that night that I managed not to cry at dinner, nor during sex afterwards, but instead waited til I was alone in the shower. I never did get to a place where I was capable of falling asleep beside him, and that night I silently wept for hours, to the point where the effort it took to stay quiet gave me a migraine.
We got up before the sun rose, and as we walked down the street to grab coffees and pastries to go, we saw the full moon sinking into the earth, tired from the bigness of its eventful night shift. I’d taken something for my headache, and the coffee helped. I fed him pieces of spanakopita while he drove us to the beach and the morning presented as new. Somewhere in the sun’s heart center, Mercury was cazimi, and fallen Venus was marching into the inevitability of her simultaneous aspects to Saturn and Jupiter.
There was no easy way to get down to the water, so he jumped first and then held me up as he guided my feet to the footholds. We scaled the perimeter of a cave on some slippery rocks and set up camp inside the secluded cavern before we stripped off our clothes and went for a swim. The salt water cleansed off the previous night’s emotional residue, but it tasted like tears and it got in our mouths when we kissed.
The Dionysian fuck wasn’t Dionysian in the sense of revelry or wild abandon — Aeneas* remained vigilantly watchful for other people and couldn’t relax — but it was Dionysian in the way that Sabrina and Karla had conceptualized the Dionysian, a wild outpouring of simultaneous grief and ecstasy. The ocean felt psychedelic, and it crashed around us more vigorously as our lovemaking intensified and ebbed when we ebbed. In one version of the myth written by Homer in the Odyssey, Artemis kills Ariadne before her marriage to Theseus can take place “because of the witness of Dionysos,”10 most likely meaning that the lovers offended Dionysos by having sex in his sacred grove. Is this just the eros version of flying too close to the sun?
I felt deflated on the way back to the city, but resigned to leaving with a nice memory of it all. Besides, he hadn’t earned an audience to my heartbreak. We held hands and talked about his upcoming visit with family and my upcoming reunion with friends in Crete. I offered that he could come up to my place to hang out for an hour or two before I really had to be anywhere, and he said maybe he could manage it, though he had a full day ahead of him of errands he had to run for his family. But when he pulled up to my street, he became suddenly terse and said he had too much to do, that he wouldn’t be able to relax. Okay, I said, impressed by how much more insulted I could apparently feel.
We got out of the car and said our final goodbyes. Maybe we’ll keep in touch, he said disingenuously. In that moment, insomnia brain finally triumphed over the thin veneer of composure I’d been maintaining, and I lost my patience. What does that actually mean though, ‘keep in touch?’ I asked. He sighed sheepishly. I knew he didn’t mean it, that he was saying it to placate me and let me down easy. I could deal with romantic disappointment, but these flimsy insincerities were too much. I called him out for his misleading dating profile, and then I reminded him that people who want to keep in touch usually make plans to do so, and that the reason why he wasn’t making plans with me was simply that, at the end of the day, he didn’t want to. It’s not that simple, he said. He said the profile was from before and that he hadn’t gotten around to changing it, but I didn’t believe him. Okay, whatever, goodbye, I said. When I got to my front door and looked back, he was already gone.
I spent the day in full collapse, racking up a consecutive Lana del Rey listening streak that my 2024 Spotify Wrapped would later remind me about. I texted my best friend that it was stupid of me to think that anything good would ever happen to me (it has) and that I might as well just pack it up at this point (I didn’t). I deleted my dating apps — it’s not like there’d be time to meet anyone else before I left Athens in a couple days, and once I got back to Florida in September, my prospects were pretty much dust.
The pain of it was maybe only partially a reaction to the fact that I really liked this person, and I don’t meet people I like that much very often. Mostly, though, it was the blowback that resulted from my own inflated expectations, and my growing despair that all the stacking astrological testimonies in the world still wouldn’t amount to much when it comes to my own love life. I began to wonder if I’d simply overlooked the importance of my own natal promise, which carries its own sort of romantic curse. The kinds of timing indicators that could be relied upon to bring happy news to my clients were perhaps not powerful enough to override the existential glass ceiling described by my birth chart. It’s not a matter of feeling worthy or not worthy of love — I feel pretty worthy. I don’t really believe it’s even a matter of being available to it necessarily, or being “healed enough.” Messy, deeply flawed people get into relationships all the time without working on themselves at all. I’ve tunneled inside of myself endlessly looking for shadows and root causes, but even self-inquiry comes with diminishing returns past a certain point, and I was tired of it anyway. Everyone always seems to have a lot of thoughts about who you need to become internally in order to solve the puzzle of true love, but few people seem willing to acknowledge how big of a role luck actually plays in this.
On my last night in Athens, I sat at a wobbly table outside a restaurant and pored through some of my old writings and documents from my college days. I found an old AIM conversation with a friend I’d saved (yes, it’s ancient), and I was articulating the same exact sensation then of feeling like the entire world was in on some big secret that I didn’t get. Even with more experience under my belt and, yes, a couple Real Adult Relationships that helped me know love better, it gutted me that I wasn’t closer by now to having any real answers for her. After all this time, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d been locked out of paradise, and I just wanted to know why I wasn’t allowed inside.
Writing about this from a place where I’ve moved on, it’s tempting to say that it wasn’t really that deep, that everything feels ten times more dramatic when you’re sleep-deprived, but I was pretty fucked up about it for the next three weeks. At times, inconsolable. I couldn’t see a timeline at this point that involved me being happily partnered. On top of that, I still didn’t know if I was pregnant or not, and the prospect of experiencing this in Florida scared me. My time in Greece was just about up, and my period was late, though that’s not exactly unusual for me or an immediate cause for alarm. The tarot cards I pulled to get a sense for what comes next trolled me again with The Empress, the pregnancy omen of pregnancy omens. I’d rather raise a baby alone than spend my life with someone who didn’t choose me, I determined, steeling myself for this possibility.
My period finally came the day after I landed on US soil, and with it left the remaining sparks of potential for a drastically different life. What a relief, mostly. I could recognize a sliver of a shadow version of me that was secretly hoping for the more sensational outcome, for the ultimate in #astrologergood, but it was truly and overwhelmingly for the best that I dodged this bullet.
I thought that Mercury’s direct motion might bring some sort of closure to the way things ended between us, but I ended up surprising myself by being the one to reach out first as it made its final square to Uranus. I said I was sorry we parted ways on such a tense note, thanked him for making my time in Athens so memorable, and wished him the best. He reciprocated the sentiment and said to let him know if I’d ever be back in his neck of the woods again. I said, Maybe, but probably not. I no longer felt like I was available for anything casual, and forgiving him was just the release valve I needed to separate the person from the way I experienced him.
After that conversation, it really did feel like he was Just Some Guy who played a role in a drama I was working out internally. He wasn’t innocent exactly, but he was hardly a villain either, and it’s not his fault I projected onto him hardcore with my litany of omens. I wondered how much of what seduced me about him was due to simple cultural differences, and the exceedingly good manners with which perhaps most Greek men treat their summer situationships.
My emotional hangover now behind me, I started to question more of the assumptions that my tower of predictive cards had rested upon. For instance: why was I so sure I couldn’t meet someone back home? In the spirit of opening to an abundance mindset, I made another dating profile, and within a day or two, I’d somehow matched with pretty much the only interesting-to-me person who’d ever come up in a hundred mile radius of where I lived.
Florida Man also had a lot of great qualities that I liked. He was thoughtful and sincere, and crucially, more transparent about his intentions toward me. Our first date was over FaceTime, as the full moon was being eclipsed in Pisces. The first time we met in person, the rainbands of Hurricane Helene messed the treetops around and gusted over the riverside where we sat singing Bright Eyes covers that he led on his guitar. I’m not sure what it means that after one date with you, the town I was planning on moving to gets flooded off the map, he said after the damage was more properly surveyed. At that moment, my plan was to leave the US for a bit longer in the spring, a year at least. We agreed to see how things went. Sparks flew, and the chemistry moved with a quickness, but some of his declarations were premature on his end. We met again on an eclipse, and again a couple days later, and by then we were trying to square our visions of the future together. As we sheltered in place during Hurricane Milton the following week, it ended almost as quickly as it began.
After everything I’d just been through, I was less easily taken in by the romance of timing and synchronicity, so it wasn’t as big of a letdown. At that point, I wasn’t about to let myself get too excited about the significance of meeting someone during a period of heightened importance, not even if it was during an eclipse that fell in his 7th house, and conjunct my 7th house ruler. Still, this picked at scabs that were still fresh from the last whirlwind romance. I felt lovebombed and discarded, a reaction that was not merely a reaction to him but to my history with men who behaved this way. He felt gun shy about making too many (or any) sacrifices to make a relationship work again, a pattern that had led to years of misery in the past.
This time, though, my life force didn’t abscond down the drain just because I no longer had a crush to energize me — at least not right away. I was able to sustain some of that wakefulness a little bit longer than I usually would, which was actually the entire point of the journey I went on in Crete. Eerily, many of the stories we play-acted during the retreat came to life in these experiences, and not just loosely, but in pretty much the exact same sequence. In placing ourselves in the shoes of Ariadne watching Theseus abandon her and the life they had planned together, we invoked the sensation in our bodies of grieving the loss of “the thing you thought was gonna be It,” the denouement of a peak experience that alters you and leaves you. And in being flooded with grief, in unblocking the channel that receives life and death as a cycle that moves through you, you are flooded with ecstasy once again in an unconditional receptiveness to what life might throw at you next.
Dionysos eventually falls in love with Ariadne, though there are versions of the myth where the gods actively conspire to get Theseus out of his way, and versions where he catches feels for the sleeping mortal after she’s already been ghosted on Naxos. The point being: Theseus had to set sail so Dionysos could be with Ariadne, the marriage not to another mortal but to the godform of eros himself. At the end of the day, this is actually just about not needing another person to serve as an intermediary between you and the erotic, but instead to live in that space unconditionally.
There’s perhaps some truth to the notion that a domicile planet can overpower everything in its vicinity. For me, that planet is Mercury. Clearly, I love a good puzzle, and the satisfaction I get from solving a complex math equation — the future being the most complex and satisfying of them all. There is also, I think, such a thing as being too clever for the good of my own heart. Expecting Mercury to do Venus’ work is a recipe for neuroticism, and for taking myself out of the connection and magic I’m actually trying to arrive to.
In the words of Colin Bedell, “you can’t predict the erotic space,” and making a home in it means being there in both your preferred and non-preferred weather, regardless of what you think may or may not happen. I’m not saying I’ve fully landed there yet. There is a small part of me that feels disdain for this other part of me that’s trying to end this essay on an uplifting note when I don’t feel entirely uplifted about my own tragic desire nature. The erotic space is a quantum field, though, apparently, and it behaves differently when it’s being observed too closely. Fine, I surrender my need to gawk at it like a tourist. I just hope that whenever “the erotic space” tries to get me pregnant again, it has the decency to send me fewer mixed signals.
I am genuinely so excited to know how this writing landed for you, any ideas it sparked or reflections you feel like sharing, but my boundary here is that I will delete comments that are patronizing, and please, no well-meaning but cliche love advice like “it’ll find you when you’re not looking for it.” Thanks for understanding 🫶
The last decan of Pisces is associated with the 10 of Cups, which depicts a sort of “dream come true/happily ever after” scenario that also implies a fleeting impermanence, a suggestion that we don’t know what comes after the rainbow. In 36 Faces, Austin Coppock describes this decan as having to do with meaningful sacrifice, a devotional quest akin to Dante’s journey through the inferno.
This story probably couldn’t have happened in this exact way if it weren’t for the symbolic seeds planted by Karla and Sabrina, who were also largely borrowing from their own experiences and readings of the myths. If you enjoyed this essay, you’ll probably enjoy its ancestor, Hungry Ghosts of Paradise.
Using embodiment and storytelling practices, we ceremonially immersed ourselves into various Greek myths as a way of engaging with eros, ecstasy, the Dionysian mysteries, and the hangover grief that awaits you on the other side of peak experiences.
The period of felicity is a firdaria period that signifies sources of enduring joy entering your life, which can often look like meeting a long-term partner. For more information, check out Dr. Ali Olomi’s Patreon.
Zodiacal releasing is a Hellenistic time lord technique that we know about thanks to the surviving works of Vettius Valens. The “peak from eros” I’m referring to here simply means that I was entering into a more active and significant period for love, one I hadn’t been in since my last serious relationship.
Profections are a different kind of time lord technique that activates a different sign (and corresponding planet) in your chart each year. Having “my 7th house ruler profected” means that I’m in a year where a Mars sign is active, in my case. I learned about both zodiacal releasing and profections from Chris Brennan initially.
Name changed to protect the sort of innocent.
“Peaking on fortune, eros, and spirit” in this case means that I was having simultaneous peaks on level 4 when releasing from the Lot of Fortune, Lot of Spirit, and Lot of Eros. In theory, this would be a day, or a set of days, in which you’d be in the right place at the right time to actualize a desire, perhaps meet someone cute, or act on a source of inspiration.
Fun fact: the asteroid Dionysus is conjunct my Venus. The more you know!
“The common interpretation of ‘because of the witness of Dionysos’ is that Theseus and Ariadne offended Dionysus by consummating their love in his sacred grove. This is a similar ending to the Atalanta myth that also includes a brief allusion to a happy ending before an angry god condemns the lovers. Perhaps this variation of the tale attempts to have a bittersweet ending that ends with a traditional tragic godly intervention.” — Bethany Williams, “Rewriting Ariadne: What Is Her Myth?”
Really enjoyed reading this. As someone who struggles to stay focused when reading, I read this in one sitting.
Raw, with delicately profound language that cut right to the essence of these transits.