Eros is Hades: On the Erotic
Venus is not the planet of love.
I created a reading based on this essay which details your specific path to living erotically, intimately and creatively. It covers your alchemical strengths and how you are being challenged to own what might be in your shadow. You will be given details on how to live a life of bliss, Eros and creativity according to your natal chart. Eros, Always, is not for those who don’t want to know what’s in the dark and why.
Venus is not the planet of romantic love. She’s the planet of beauty, pleasure, connection, harmony and attraction. She is also what we’re naturally good at. She’s interested in Taurean pleasures of the body and Libran attractions of the mind. Love is an alchemical process and Venus is in her detriment in Scorpio, the sign of transformation. She does not find the messy business of becoming beautiful because it is unrefined and painful. These are the same reasons she’s uninterested in conflict—a necessary ingredient in a truly loving relationship. She’s in her detriment in Aries.
The person we’re in love with is often the one who points out the parts of us that are in the way of love. They are the ones who sense the moment Venus leaves her painful reflections behind for new unburdened beauty. Our truly loving partners are often the ones who ask us to sit with our blind spots and our pain so as to live into more of ourselves and leave inauthentic versions of ourselves behind. Hades hears this call. Eros, love, and Hades are one in the same.
Those who live out the Venus archetype in long-term romantic relationships are those who cannot stand being born.
Venus has been given the archetypal reigns in modern day relationships and dating culture. This is doubly tragic because, aside from being misattributed, she’s also been twisted into symbolizing modern money. Under late-stage capitalism’s constant pressure for more, more, more at the cost of our actual natural resources, most want a partner who feels like a quick come up—a status symbol—not someone who is bringing them below ground. The ideals of our culture don’t end when we clock out at work so when death comes for our identities while in relationship—and it always does, at least one partner tends to feel they’re being asked for undesirable free labor and are thus losing the game.
Capitalism doesn’t abide by the natural rhythms of our earth. There can be no winter under this system. There can be no variation. Only more. Capitalism’s incentive is to make us feel like we do not have enough. In such a lack mindset, anyone who asks us to give up something we identify with is seen as an archetypal thief and an enemy threatening our material safety. This is tragic.
Love is thwarted twice—once into an expectation of continuous Venusian pleasure and twice in that Venus has been twisted into a complex of commodity. A complex consists of feelings, thoughts and attitudes held together by ever powerful memories of all the times its parts were linked. Venus is caught in such a web with money as its center and relationships at its edges as the collective consciousness values easy partnerships weighed on a scale. This scale asks, “What can you do for me to make me feel wealthier?” and as we all know, stupid games win stupid prizes. The truly wealthy under capitalism don’t work hard and this bizarre truth is infused into what we think relationships should be like if we are to believe we’ve hit the jackpot with the person we’re dating. The part folks skip over in this complex is that the truly wealthy don’t work hard because they’re benefitting from the exploited labor of others. Someone is doing that work. It’s just not the ones at the top.
In this Venusian complex at work in romantic relationships, the unseen exploited labor often falls onto the feminine presenting partner who tries to create a sense of ease in her male presenting partner’s experience of her. Her payment? He doesn’t leave and she receives breadcrumbs of affection fantasized into feasts. Meanwhile, this dynamic keeps the feminine employed under a boss who doesn’t much want to hear about the lonely and fucked up conditions of her workplace. But hold on, boss? Workplace? It sounds like…
Capitalist ideals and ideologies have no business in erotic relationships.
There is more to be said about freeing Venus in a future essay. My own Venus is home in Libra and I intend on prying her out of the grimy hands of patriarchal capitalist bullshit values. Venus was never supposed to be me-vs-you. Such an imbalance inspired her to initiate the chain of events that leads Persephone underground. As it goes in Ovid’s tale, she asks Eros to shoot Hades with his strongest arrow so that he may fall in love with Persephone and bring balance back into her life. In other versions of this story, Eros is the god that is able to fall in love because he pierced himself. Either way, Eros and Hades are one in the same, separated in myth only to show two sides of one god. For now, I’m thankful the soulmate belongs to a transpersonal planet. Pluto’s taboo status has ironically protected the Eros archetype from modern desecration.
Pluto is currently retrograde in Capricorn and is moving back and forth between the systems we have built (Capricorn) and the ones we are transforming into (Aquarius). Somewhere, Aphrodite and Eros/Hades are sighing a breath of relief.
Eros asks us to look at the poverty in our soul and the ways it is reflected in the life we live by taking us into the underworld, not to stay there but, to eat of our truth, to come back up to the surface seeded with soul and to allow our dried and abandoned psychic land access to the sunlight of our consciousness. These underworld places are unkempt and wild and only those who can stand the ugly, unclaimed and uncharted can plant an Eden that won’t spit them out for knowing themselves.
Relationships are not meant to be power struggles because both partners are on the same side—as separate individuals. An individuated person or one on such a journey has survived alchemical fires enough times to recognize when darkness is the arrival of Eros/Hades/Pluto/Love. The initiated, or as Jung calls them, “the twice-born” do not fear conflict nor pain because we have already been made new from it. We do not cower because we are not cowards. We are able to die without dying.
The alchemical process of love is not pleasure-based. It is truth-based. This level of truth is found in the unconscious depths, Pluto’s territory. Scorpio placements often know the dark will come for every love and they know it marks the beginning, not the end.
When pleasure feels out of reach and Venus determines the beloved is no longer beautiful, it’s Eros, or Pluto, that knows how to stay in love.
Venus wants ease. Eros wants intimacy. On some level, I have always known this truth, that Pluto rules love, but I thought I was biased as someone who is ruled by Pluto. After encountering a book by Richard Idemon, something within me decided to own my intuition.
In Through the Looking Glass: A Search for the Self in the Mirror of Relationships by Idemon, he describes Eros as the ancient Greek god who was the prime creative force that created our universe. He did this by merging chaos and matter. Eros: what happens when two are combined in such a way that they are transformed into a third. He describes the other Greek gods, including Aphrodite, as uninterested as well as unable to fall in love because of their immortality. Eros, having pierced himself, is the only exception.
He writes, “I associate Eros with Scorpio and Pluto, with the watery quality of love, a love which involves suffering….Pluto is the fundamental planet representing Eros.” I had to pause when I first read this. How was I reading what I thought but never owned? Maybe it’s because I am in my south node return or maybe it was just another Tuesday but, Idemon describes Eros as painful for many reasons focusing mostly on the idea that the “merging of souls cannot stay at that peak of intensity forever.” More on this in a minute.
Eros is described as a love that is experienced by letting go of the known self and merging one’s soul with something else. “Jung referred to people who have gone through this process as the ‘twice-born.’ He also said there are extremely few twice-born people around and I agree with him.” Most people are very scared of changing the way they see themselves or rumbling the rubble beneath the ground of their identity let alone tolerating the idea of merging with something foreign. They imagine they will end should they have a transpersonal experience that impacts how they see themselves and instead, they see it all as a power struggle between them and the something-else, often someone else. These folks don’t know the experience marks where they will truly begin and they often won’t let the experience unfold toward the proof they need to visit the unknown again and again willingly or at least, with some respect.
Folks often abandon Plutonic experiences by choosing to ignore their implications, deeming them too much, too inconvenient and of course, too intense. They often do the same to Scorpio placements and those with an 8th house emphasis. They believe they are abandoning the feeling they fear and its god in the underworld not knowing he lives in them.
This quote is so very important:
“If you don’t open your soul to the ecstatic energy symbolized by Pluto—an ecstatic relationship in which merging is akin to dying—then Pluto will operate unconsciously and invisibly. If repressed, it will find some way of dragging you and any planet it aspects down into the underworld. This is why a lot of people go about living life like zombies. The way I see these kinds of people is that Pluto has grabbed their soul and relegated it to the underworld. It is only through deep pain that the soul can be reclaimed, which is why Jung remarked that we don’t change until we have suffered enough.”
Pluto finds us because he’s Eros—he’s where we come from. The underworld is the unconscious and the god of that place rules all the parts of us we don’t know. They are still ours and sometimes, the characters there are more ours than our conscious personalities are. I call them ‘the basement committee.’ They often oversee the somewhat dissociated daytimers and try to get a word in. They’re looking for a way to spend time up here. For those where the myth has been unnaturally halted, Persephone stays underground all year. Sometimes, this means meeting someone with 5 Scorpio placements (hi). Sometimes, it’s meeting tragedies.
I once knew someone who had about two minutes worth of bandwidth for conflict resolution and claimed ease as a core relational value. They faced countless tower moments in their life and had a recurring dream of a dark presence in their bedroom doorway. They woke up, always, before Hades got to their bed. After spending some time together, they told me in a panic, the dark man got right up to them. I thought this might happen because as Idemon says, “Scorpio is inspired and stimulated by arousing and awakening someone other than the self.” I’m a Scorpio sun and rising conjunct Pluto. I never talked about this dark man nor did I talk about dreamwork but, as James Baldwin said, “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” I loved them and was able to see their untended pain and how it stood between us like misplaced armor so I gently spoke to it in the time I knew them.
I tend to immediately and consistently represent painful and banished truths to folx so my presence has a tendency to catalyze. Anyone with Scorpio or 8th house emphasis in their charts understands this isn’t a boast. But, I wouldn’t have it any other way as I feel a deep sense of Eros love for my life, creativity, pets, relationships and partners.
Bliss is an emotion I experience often. This is a boast. But before I was born into the me of today, I was caught in repeated experiences with people who wanted a manageable slice of the Eros I am born from. I no longer offer myself in pieces.
In any case, ease-lover and I fell out over a conflict that wouldn’t see the light of their consciousness long enough to be resolved. Passing their dark man on my way out, we slowly nodded to one another with the same pain in our wide dark eyes. In the dictionary I’m writing, I define rage as ‘grabbing the steering wheel a little harder every time I remember someone I loved who moved on as a ghost upset with me for showing them they were dead.’ I sometimes wonder if Hades is still lurking in the halls of their unconscious hoping to be lived out or if they are still prioritizing ease and meeting him out in the world instead.
If repressed, [Pluto] will find some way of dragging you and any planet it aspects down into the underworld. This is why a lot of people go about living life like zombies. The way I see these kinds of people is that Pluto has grabbed their soul and relegated it to the underworld.
Eros pierces us with love. This part of Pluto is rarely discussed. We’d all need much fewer tower moments in our lives if we’d let ourselves fall in love instead of to pieces. Most cannot stand looking at the true nature and origin of the conflict avoidance that thwarts their capacity for deep intimacy as those roots are hidden in their unconscious under pain. They need the walls to crumble to really face themselves and their truth. They need to feel there is no other choice. It is tragic to need rock bottom as a birth place over erotic love. Couldn’t be me.
Idemon says, “Eros thrives on mystery. Eros thrives on the unknown. Eros is the god of the underworld who dwells in the invisible realm. Its only through darkness and mystery, through plummeting into the unknown, that the erotic can happen.” Needless to say, Eros is not everyone’s god.
Often in relationships, one person senses the withholding of love from the other and the withholder starts to find it all too burdensome to work through as their attention is on some corporate ladder or outer status symbol of success or Venusian pleasure or [insert any other stand in for really living]. In deciding that healing avoidance is too unrefined an experience, they avoid the mystery, the unknown, the darkness where love, Eros, is empowered. But to be clear, the message cannot be discarded: Folks who find Hades too intense siphon off their psyches at their pain points which, so long as they’re avoided, stand in the way of truly experiencing the power of love and the person they were meant to be.
The anxiously attached face a similar issue as they choose to avoid themselves and live through their partner’s alchemical journey or, often, the tension created by the lack of such a journey. This is done at the expense of one’s own homecoming. It’s much easier to create a set up where shadowed self-rejection is outsourced to a partner than it is to admit having rejected oneself all the while and in so doing have chosen folx to carry the projection too painful to reabsorb into awareness.
Jung said, “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.” I’d like to add, so is loving oneself. The pain of intimate early parental rejection becomes a self-concept just as any trauma becomes a part of the personality when untended. The conscious mind experiences this as anxiety, fear of abandonment and vulnerability while also believing healing comes through someone else. Meanwhile, the unconscious carries self-hatred due to rejection that occurred during a time when the only choice was to blame oneself. Unconsciously then, the shadow projects this attitude onto others who then fulfill the role of rejector. This is why, often, the anxiously attached begin to lose interest if their partner does begin to take on the challenge of secure attachment. Their partner begins to quit the role of rejector and perhaps is no longer the center of the “problem.” Then what?
While it stands that the anxiously attached have a head start on healing relational wounds, they can unknowingly place themselves in Venus’ realm where the messy business of becoming is projected while also believing they are courting Eros and running into a bunch of assholes.
If you see yourself in this, the salve is in starting to allow yourself to feel this truth: the parts of you which you think others would most hate actually carry seeds of your soul. They are waiting for you to treat them as such. As you begin to believe this, you are pulling your own self-hatred and self-rejection to your doorstep and inviting them in. The magical question to ask is, What do you need from me to grow into the light? Moving in slow steady ways toward those answers is self-love. Most folks speak on accepting our shadows as if they are waiting to be plucked like flowers. Absolutely not. Let’s not forget Persephone plucked a flower and bloomed into hell. The characters there have seen only darkness and have had to call to similarly dark energies in the outer world in order to feel a shade of existence. They are not ok. How would you act if that were you and you were suddenly cast into the light? Unhinged. You are their unconditionally loving parent. Free them from the basement with loving discernment, boundaries and gentle re-parenting.
Idemon describes solar love throughout the book as loving from a place of true self-acceptance and urge toward individuation. I believe this is the way to Eros love relationships. It is not about deciding between darkness or light but about granting darkness the respect it always deserved, in the light.
Merging with another in Eros love is so enlivening because it shows us, in bursts, the potentiality of our consciousness when love is a priority. It is as though, for the first time, we can stand witnessing someone as they witness us, in love. It’s as though our striving for status is suddenly absurd and we can’t believe we were so focused on such trivial things. Perhaps it feels absurd because it really is absurd. This love also asks us to do what’s necessary to stay in it. Most want it for free because Pluto gives a burst of powerful energy freely but, the expectation is to do what’s needed to maintain it.
The shadow carries our light that was banished but it also carries the pain of why. Shadow wounds want their salve. Shadow selves are as unruly as untended children. It is all a mess of pain before it is not. Coupling this with the fact that old habits die hard and capitalism is every commercial break, folks believe they’ve fallen out of love when pain comes and Eros cannot live while being de-prioritized, for any reason. In these situations, these folks have not fallen out of love. They’ve refused to fall in.
True out of-this-world erotic love takes prioritized attention, courage and willingness for many reasons. One of which is that bliss and pain are not opposites and the other is that the current culture finds intangible bliss threatening. The systems we live in do not benefit from us being happy and in love. A deeply satisfied person is hard to manipulate into spending, difficult to create lack in to sell to and almost impossible to keep sick enough to sell symptom management to.
Idemon says, “Eros is accompanied by an ecstatic kind of feeling, almost a religious kind of ecstasy.” This feeling does not find a home in a value system that allows for it only when dabbling with psychedelics or ‘honeymoon stages.’
Richard Siken writes, in “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out:”
“Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying.”
Years ago, I wrote my response, “You are leather and I am the animal. I survived every unholy hand that touched me. You should be terrified. I am low to the ground. I hear everything. Your terror is a language. It says, ‘I am not worthy of housing God.’ And so, I move on.”
Idemon and I part ways toward the end of his discussion on Eros. He begins to speak about this love as one that is too overwhelming to be held within an individual or a couple. He says, “Erotic experience belongs to the realm of the religious, the mystical, and the creative. It is a tremendously powerful feeling that can be quite overwhelming.” I tend to agree with this in that the religious, mystical and the creative is not separate from the love in romantic relationships. Idemon disagrees.
He says, “There is also something basically tragic about Plutonic or eros type relationships for the simple reason that you cannot live in a perpetual state of ecstasy.” Where he’s got it wrong is that Plutonic relationships/Eros do not ask for a perpetual state of ecstasy—even the queen of the underworld doesn’t stay down there for longer than 6 months. Eros needs space because it combines two separate entities into a third. Without space and differentiation between I and Other, Eros does not exist. His very nature is to combine, not to perpetuate. Eros renews us with our own truth to keep us open to being combined.
We cannot stay the same and stay in love.
Eros requires a lover to embark on their own individuation journey for their lifetime and find an other who is committed to doing the same.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, “In relationships, if the heart is truly involved, we can create ourselves through each other’s love and create ourselves in new ways…there is a merging, an acceptance of love as a spiritual path, as love being a way of knowing the great and deep self.” Eros is creation energy. Ecstasy is a byproduct.
As Idemon discusses his reluctance to grant Eros space in partnerships, the audience begins to get uncomfortable. One person asks, “We all have to go through periods of death and rebirth so aren’t we courting eros a lot of the time?” Idemon obliges, “Yes, it’s true that we go through periods of dying as we are to be reborn anew, but it’s also true that most of us don’t relish the idea of death in any form. Most of us are terrified of death; most of us want to have things basic and easy.” Ah, the bane of my existence. “Easy.”
Not a single person I know talks about ease as a value except when it come to the soul numbing expectations of capitalism. We speak of depth, intimacy, creativity, vulnerability, truth, saturation, bliss, happiness. These are not easy nor are they easy adjacent. Ease is a faded color in comparison. A dimmer aspiration. And, basic? This doesn’t deserve my attention.
But Idemon shows us, by accident, what he means to say: Eros is not sustainable because I require ease and Eros is not easy. My eyes glaze over with boredom. Why on earth would we want things basic and easy when bliss and authenticity are available to us? Idemon is an Aquarius sun with a few other Aqua placements and the shadow of this sign can often be where Leo values live, shamefully.
It is one thing to subscribe to a boring value because the shadow is a scary place and it is quite another to lecture about Eros from such a place. It’s like, bruh, who sent you? Not Eros.
Here he starts talking about how we live in a society that doesn’t provide outlets for Eros which I agree with but it’s because this society doesn’t value the erotic and the lifestyle its god demands-- one that prioritizes individuation, creativity and a love relationship above all else. Such people are called selfish or co-dependent or eccentric before they can even finish stating their values. He discusses the Taurus-Scorpio axis as one that is very difficult to integrate in a positive way because Aphrodite and Hades have become our modern day Eve and Satan. Agreed.
He loses me once more when he says the energy of the underworld can make you “blow a fuse quite easily.” I mean, if you can’t handle Pluto, just say that. And, I clutched my pearls when I read, “Such powerful energy is very hard to contain within a one-to one relationship. The energy of eros is best grounded by experiencing it within a group or around a number of other people.” It is only hard if you’ve never done it before and if you are trying to fit it into a very practical life. In practice, it’s like any other muscle. It’s not that hard.
AND, for the love of Hades, a group?! Any Scorpio will tell you that around a “number of other people” is when they feel they are in actual hell. Folks often become their most inauthentic selves when faced with the perceived judgments of several other people. The persona of a social identity doesn’t bode well with Eros. In myth, Hades wore an invisible helmet when visiting the topside. Eros is for those who can stand him, not those who find a way to water him down through collective identification.
As the audience becomes more uneasy and asks question after question, Ideomon reiterates. “All I can say is the energy of eros is too much for a one-to-one relationship.” It is not. If both people value continuing the journey into more and more psychic ground and more and more individuation, they are separate and new, all of the time. Eros can stay and find a home in such partnership. Where the author and I agree is that folks who want to court Eros ought to have a creative pursuit in their lives. It doesn’t have to be what they do for a living but this energy isn’t on hold while we are single. It’s an orientation toward life. Creativity is Eros creation energy and is ultimately a phenomenal and necessary way to engage with this archetype and learn how to hold it.
He then blatantly and boldly lies: “As a rule, however, you need a mass of people to arouse the full energy of Pluto and Eros.” Full stop. This is absolutely untrue and the furthest thing from a rule. Hades didn’t find Persephone at a theater nor a ball. He found her by herself. We each took on the shape of the cosmos at birth. We are each more than enough for Eros to make himself at home.
Every month, when the moon is in Scorpio for two days, it is conjunct 5 of my placements. Recently, Pluto opposed my moon for quite a while and the south node in Scorpio is currently conjunct my own south node, a once in 18 year transit. The recent Scorpio eclipse was conjunct my sun. I have changed so much in just the last couple of years, I sometimes wonder how much of my prior self I will eventually recognize. I’m now a deeply creative person who was once certain she could never create anything but a stick figure. I’ve fallen in deeper love with myself and the parts of me that were once shamed out of existence. But it hurt like hell.
Had I found it inconvenient, my access to the erotic vibrancy I now know would have been denied. I am not in the business of creating deathbed regrets. I’d rather die while I’m here than face the fact that I never did when it’s too late. I’ve become who I used to admire and thought wasn’t possible for me because today’s me was so far away from who I once was—a quiet fawning girl who spoke softly and agreeably or not at all.
When I was younger, I had recurring dreams of wanting to speak or scream and being unable. And then, a dream of a tall, terrifying and ancient warrior woman in the wilderness chasing me, catching me, and tearing me in half. Each half of me was braided into a point, those points, two shades of a brown colored pencil. She then tried putting them back together.
In another dream, some time later, I was shaking my head violently as I was imagining a disturbing scene. Dream inception? In the scene in dream me’s mind, a scared mother’s cheeks were being punctured with many holes as a few men tried to tear her mouth open at the jaw. In the next scene, the leader of the group was at the foot of my bed, his temple bleeding. He said to me as I laid in bed terrified, “Look, it’s happening to you, too.” I touched my face and felt the blood. I looked up to ask what was happening to me, too?! He was gone. I woke with a start, my eyes landing at the foot of my bed where he had just been.
After fearing the foot of my bed for a week, I spoke with him in active imagination. I learned he was a guide here to help me open my mouth. Not two weeks later, I felt primal rage thrumming in my heartbeat as I saw a man violently lunge at a woman. My face was quickly in the small space between theirs and my voice was born through potent venom. It turns out, my stinger has always been in my mouth. In using it, the old me was dead and gone.
I don’t miss her nor my muted dreams.
As a Scorpio rising, Eros and I meet every morning and at each initiation in my life. He’s not too much for one, nor two.
These days, I identify with the receptivity I have to love so when change comes for the rest of me, as it tends to do very often, I am not lost. I try to stop kicking and screaming soon after I notice I am doing it. I’m a fixed water sign after all so even I am prone to wanting things to stay the same.
I speak of rage and love back to back because rage shows up where true love has been wounded. In a world that favors planting new seeds of fear in women every day, I love them too much to allow it in my presence. No one will come for a woman in my line of vision and leave without being introduced to the truth. I am more than happy to be a messenger from Hades and often, Eros sees that folks are barely born once and have yet to meet the chaos that creates. I am more than honored—I am enraged to introduce them.
All this to say, you won’t find Eros in large numbers of people. You’ll find Hades at home, in your psyche, your creativity and your romantic relationships—if you are able.
An audience member gets creative and poses a scene for Idemon asking, “I’m thinking of marriages where both people are allowed to change and grow. Maybe those kinds of changes are what keep up the mystery and interest?”
He replies, “Yes I guess that can happen…it could happen. It takes two very individuated people who are in touch on one level or another with all of the different forms of love that we’ve been discussing…who are channeling some of the intensity of eros into their work or into something creative.” Richard. Mr. Idemon. Rich. All this talk about how impossible it is to have Eros in long term relationships because it would take two people who have a deep interest in their own individuation and creativity? Yikes.
Spoiler: When becoming more and more yourself, you often get the itch to have a creative practice. Individuating is meeting Hades again and again and the power of destruction is a two-sided god, the other is the creative impulse that created the universe.
We continue with the shadow of fixed air making an appearance: “Eros thrives on taboo, on that which is forbidden. If I can have you at anytime, then the pain and ecstasy of our coming together and separating again is lost.” Diminishing the potentiality of the individual to less than worthy in favor of easier experiences in groups or agape—a love built on space, is the shadow of Aquarius. We will always have parts of ourselves that are forbidden and taboo. Honoring this in a partner and in oneself is all that’s needed to experience Eros. People are as boring as they are scared and as unable to be in Eros as they are unable to face the fires of becoming who they really are. And yes, most people are so boring. Barely once born.
It's ironic that he rejects the depths of Pluto while saying, “Most of us have been taught to deny, repress or reject Venus and Pluto by sign, house and aspect.”
Our beloved is the one that inspires us to come out from hiding because they have been sent by Eros to come and get us and bring us down to where it is that we left ourselves. They are our muse in hell. They are our bliss in love. A partner that supports our truest self is one that will not be satisfied by the mirage, the hologram, the almost-us that keeps showing up. It’s fucking boring. It is lonely to witness someone in their blind spot.
A person committed to themselves in individuation is often one that welcomes transformative love. An ongoing relationship carries this sacred alchemical vessel through the years if and only if both people are truly invested in having the relationship that Eros rules.
Hades will only ever ask you to sacrifice what is not truly yours—who you became at the cost of your true self. You are your answered prayer so long as you do not cower when the fire comes. You get the god you believe in.
eros, always,
Nairy
a poet in wonderland
p.s. If you know someone who would enjoy this essay, please forward it to them!