persephone, after hours

on erotic living

Erotic energy yearns for more and more complexity and creativity and intimacy in all ways. This is when we’re most alive—when our yearning is directed toward our unique wholeness. 

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I graze on light like a soft animal who dreams of being human. I séance with ghosts every day. When they find me, they haunt (hope) at life. That’s where ghosts come from—parts of self who hope at life. Unlived lives sing siren songs from my own ocean. The Persephone in me is a Queen who sometimes wishes for a lighter crown. It’s heavy, this sight.

All I know for sure is I am mine now. This I take as holy sacrament every day until the prayers that are my writing are answered by a voice that is just like mine but still; like the space between knowings. Like the moment I realize, I know what is holy. That is my answered prayer. I am my answered prayer.

If we have any hope at all for a mirror we can stand looking into for longer than a few minutes, we must look into the ecstatic longing for wholeness.

Creating more consciousness always means destroying a sense of self as it was without the birth of a fantasy made imperfectly manifest which is to say, perfectly alive.

We’re most ourselves when we fantasize about who we could be. These fantasies are from our never-forgotten impulse toward more life. Toward our creation. These fantasies are from Eros.

Perhaps the most erotic act is being born. I might be biased as this is natally where I meet Eros. As a Scorpio Rising conjunct Pluto, we meet every morning. Bjork, a triple Scorpio says, “I have to recreate the universe every morning when I wake up.” Same.

James Hillman says, “Eros is the God of psychic reality, the true lord of the psyche, and we’ve found our paternity, the creative principle which engenders soul and is the patron of the field of psychology.” He also says, “The creating Gods are the destroying Gods.” Jung says, “Creation is as much destruction as construction.”

The Jungian analysts are talking about Scorpio & Pluto and Jungian astrologer Richard Idemon says it in more cosmological terms, “I believe Pluto is the fundamental planet representing Eros. 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.”

Now, during Scorpio Season, the identity of the cosmos is steeped in Eros. Scorpio and Pluto in your own natal chart are where you have a powerhouse of erotic energy but collectively, we are in potent cosmic sky sauce. Imbibe. If you want to feel more present and alive in your life and don’t know where to start, now is the time to take a hit of the times, metaphorically. If you drink, this is a Malbec, wet and dry and honest. If you partake, this is an Indica that opens Bluebeard’s lock. It’s the stuff you have to see so you know exactly how important it is to your life force that you are truly alive. Scorpio Season is a portal to erotic energy and, of course, what’s erected in its way.

Eros is the drumbeat that pulses through reality and, outside of an artist’s life, it’s usually only given true attention in love relationships and even then, only in the beginning months. The trouble with being in relationship to the god of psychic reality through one fractal of life is that it’s a compartmentalization. Your relationships will always suffer if they’re Eros’ only temple.

This god lives everywhere or blows up one space to take it all over. Enter Hades. Enter dark night of the soul. Enter initiation.

It’s up to you to have a conscious relationship with the creative and destructive energies that are either unconsciously running the show or, with your consent. Let’s not forget that Persephone wasn’t damned to abduction after abduction. She reigned as Queen. The details of the myth end where her erotic life begins but yours don’t have to.

Many Jungians suggest that because Eros is an archetype (or daimon), it’s not an energy humans can hold. While I understand the desire to remain human in the face of an archetype/the gods, this is a dismissive response to erotic energy in an effort to defend against its power. The truth is, the only way to ensure that Eros is flowing in your life without being dammed up and blowing up is to avoid compartmentalizing this god to one realm of life. Living a life of erotic flow is not stealing from the gods. It’s co-creating with the life force that intends to be made manifest through you, in human form. Erotic living is, simply put, feeling fully alive in or out of love with someone.

Experiencing Eros only when in love is a recipe for heartbreak. It ensures that you meet the creative and destructive poles of erotic energy with the person you’re in love with. It’s asking a new relationship to carry your shadowed god. I’m a lover girl through and through so believe me when I say that you don’t want this. Jung said that we are “not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of [our] lives…the general neurosis of our age.” So many of us turn to our Other to resolve this feeling for us and that they do, for a honeymoon. Erotic energy is made manifest between two distinctly different people, in this case. The trouble with getting lost in the Other is that we forget to stay differentiated. While Eros desires to merge, it paradoxically asks us to remain different enough to continue contributing to a polarity that can merge. The answer to this paradox is being devoted to your own erotic life in the face of a new erotic relationship and when single.

Richard Idemon says, “Scorpio has achieved a differentiation between self and others, and therefore can see another being as a person in his or her own right.” There’s an educative Eros principle in the Scorpio energy of your own natal chart. Depending on aspects and interceptions, every sign can access their own portal to the differentiation needed for Eros to thrive.

Otherwise, folks are riding off the high of the first soul-merge that is falling in love and abandoning their own identity and integrity until like a house of cards, it all comes tumbling down as the personal or private conditions for sustaining love have been abandoned. Eros falls. Psuedo-eros tries to take the reins and then, the relationship inevitably becomes a field of insecurity and heartbreak.

So how do you live erotically and avoid falling into the treacherous highs and lows of erotic love with no container to hold it?

Creativity.

A few things first. Consider asking yourself if you only feel alive when in love or when heartbroken/longing. If so, you have likely relegated Eros to relationships.

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A second question is, where do I involve myself in pseudo-erotic activities to quell my erotic hunger? These are often socially acceptable pet addictions like doom-scrolling or in more life-disaffirming states, porn or sex addiction. They’re marked by the feeling of loss after you’re done. That’s how you can recognize it as pseudo-erotic. Erotic acts are life-affirming and create more psychic land. Psuedo-erotic acts are distractions from a sense of emptiness that you drop back into when you’re done.

Relationships that make you feel alive but drop you off into an emptiness when you’re alone can also be pseudo-erotic. That emptiness will not sustain the erotic charge of that relationship for long, either. Careful. Stay you. If love finds you before you find it, initiate yourself into loving your creative ideas and/or current projects out loud in your life. Find your pulse and follow it. You are important. Act like it.

For erotic energy to last in a romantic relationship, it needs to find itself in other places in your life to alleviate the pressure that is a God being limited to just one initiation ritual (falling in love), and its aftereffects.

Many have also given up on what James Hollis calls “The Eden Project”—the urge to find a lover that fixes everything for us including, and perhaps especially, the whole messy business of individuation. Even the corner of life where Eros still emerges, often quick and brutal, is now under heavy suspicion. So, in modern day culture, Eros is shadowed twice. This is often what happens when there is a tragedy. There’s a first layer of what happened, the gone/desecration/genocide. Then, there’s the way that tragedy grows and ages and passes on generational trauma to the next iteration of its availability for conscious integration into our psychic awareness.

I’m not of the mind that you have to love yourself in order to date someone, but I am saying it would be a great idea to make your life erotic so that you are a safe container for more of the same instead of being re-introduced to a God that has only ever historically created predictable conditions for eventual emotional abandonment.

Why regress to living out another Persephone story forgetting you already have your crimson crown? Are your fingers not stained with the blood of enough broken-heartedness? What about wholeheartedness? Persephone didn’t go kicking and screaming nor through seduction to her 6 months in hell. She went to reign.

Creativity as the truest answer to the question of erotic living isn’t a cute introduction to craft-making. I’m talking about the instinct to create which is your birthright and lineage. Beyond your inner child, this is your oldest ancestor, meaning god, meaning Eros, meaning creation itself.

Jung named five instincts: hunger, sexuality, activity, reflection and creativity. Hillman says, “Creative imagination that bespeaks the imaginal realm results from vitality and passion. It is born in the blood from the awakened, not the dreaming, psyche.”

Living erotically is deepening into your creative instinct (also a destructive instinct). It is becoming fluent in the path that Eros takes. The high of a muse, the doubt of being able to keep up with what skills you need to acquire to carry the vision to life, the toil involved in the technical details, the flow state that is a merge state with divinity, the feeling of the muse disappearing, the devotion to the vision anyway, the suspicion that you’re not enough to carry it through, the coming to life of your idea in a way that is changed from its original form to the same degree that you too are changed by birthing it. Hillman describes Eros as having a double aspect in that compulsion and inhibition are co-present alongside the feeling of being driven and blocked, enthusiastic and critical, full and empty. This is a polarity that can be lived out consciously so as to not over identify at the extremes.

Hillman says, “Creativity impels devotion to one’s person in its becoming through [their] medium and it brings with it a sense of helplessness and increasing awareness of its numinous power…Our experiences of the force of individuality and its relentless pressure upon each soul to realize its potential are difficult to distinguish from experiences of the immanent gods in their creator roles.”

Folks often don’t approach love relationships with this conscious creativity, Eros. They want to use the same tools for a new project. They want to avoid the learning curve. They want to be stubborn about whatever they have to change in order to gain a new relational/creative skill. They want to claim their sense of self is being disempowered by such creative change. They want to project their feelings of a lack of control onto their partner who must be asking too much in an effort at power, not love, surely. And on and on. Truly tragic.

When engaging with the creative instinct, you become well prepared for the highs and lows that come with erotic love without being so susceptible to taking the mini deaths that comes through erotic relationships as cause for cutting ties. You recognize your Other is simply asking you to become your next creation. Break ups are often concretized psychological processes.

We become strangers to each other out of fear of becoming strangers to ourselves. Like I said, I’m a lover girl and it pains me whenever this happens to anyone. It also enrages every single one of my 5 Scorpio placements.

Idemon doesn’t believe Eros can thrive in relationships for much of his book until an audience member presses the issue and he says, “Okay, it could happen. But what I mean to imply is that it is very difficult…It would take two people who are living as adults; two people who have to some extent broken the umbilical cord or who are channeling some of the intensity of eros into their work or into something creative. I don’t know many people like that.”

Hi, my name is Nairy, pronounced nyree. It means, ‘from the mountain of rivers.’ I am ‘people like that.’ Are you?

You can become fluent in the language of creation and destruction as you survive the death of so many of your own creations. So much of art isn’t what it first was in The Vision. There’s often a death in order to become a vessel for your creation, for erotic energy. Many of the great artists and musicians understand that to create their best work, they’ve had to die to a transpersonal energy that was channeled through them. This is practicing receptivity to Eros. A love relationship is an act of creation. The nuanced art of an intimate bond is one of the most beautiful living, breathing and vulnerable collaborations with Eros. It is sacred. To pretend otherwise is a desecration.

Hillman coming in hot: “…that which builds up at the same time restructures.” This is CREATIVITY and LOVE and EROTIC SEX. These are core vessels of Eros.

The mark of alchemical art making has to do with being changed by the creation itself. What’s more, you exude erotic energy and can sustain your own identity alongside a relationship with a mature and embodied sense of groundedness while allowing yourself the journey of Eros via a beloved.

To keep a love relationship erotically alive, you too must be erotically alive.

We cannot mine the budding relationship for more and more Eros over time. We are the mine and the relationship is held with our hands that understand where nature’s abundance comes from. Hillman says that women can “quest for and cling to relationships in order to become fertilized and to generate. ‘Castration’ for women then means an identification with Aphrodite and with that single form of feminine loving.” He goes on to say that Aphrodite doesn’t want soul to find love nor love to find soul. She represents the “anti-psychic” (anti-psyche) component in loving and blocks Eros. He cautions that folks must gain the discernment to know when Eros is moving us versus Aphrodite but more on this distinction in the next essay of this series.

Hillman says, “The deeper relationships go, the more they can hold…when there is no containing opus for creativity, we have the archetypes bursting straight onto the stage…the creative-destructive primordial urge, man driven, desperate, dismembered; the self in the psychotic process.” I told you this wasn’t a cute introduction to creativity. This is your very life.

The trouble is, creativity is just as shadowed as erotic energy because they’re one and the same. We sneak creative time, we don’t have time for creative time, we wish we could have creative time, we long for creative time. This is often the same way we treat romantic love—a luxurious state of being that’s silly to expect longevity from. I wholeheartedly object to the idea that eros cannot thrive long-term. Sustainable erotic energy waxes and wanes as all living things do. And, it requires a commitment to the erotic process of individuation with or without a partner. It requires being creative and in so doing, becoming brave in the face of the god of love. Most folks shrink in love relationships that ask them to become. This is the one sin that Scorpio, Eros, cannot forgive—a weak spine.

Eros says, stand up and taste your sacrament or kneel in the wreckage of your life that does not know what is holy.

It is a desecration of your erotic temple to deny your own urge to be fully alive and erotic.

I don’t mean you ought to drop your life or a habit and instead become an artist although, why not? It’s a worthwhile path toward individuation. It creates a familiar ability to be comfortable within the process of regeneration. I know a lot can come up with a loaded shadow word like ‘artist’ so here’s a simple list to pull from: poet, painter, musician, song-writer, photographer, novelist, therapist, essayist, jewelry maker, collager, digital artist, channeler, and anything else that sets you at the edge of your psyche in full faith that there is land that will grow under your feet if only you create it.

Hillman says, “The so-called creative genius may have a more direct and uncomplicated relation to his instinct…even without artistic talent, even without the ego strength of great will, even without good fortune, at least one form of the creative is continuously open for each of us: psychological creativity. Soul-making: we can engender soul.”

The conscious and the unconscious coming together to create more that’s available to the ego is the ultimate work of art and is erotic by nature. Artmaking is a direct way and as Hillman says, so is inner work, therapy, analysis—soul making. When you’re invested in truly coming to consciousness yourself, you’re a force to be reckoned with because you are a place that Eros doesn’t have to worry about blowing up. You’re on the journey and you have stepped into the flow of erotic energy. You’ve said you’re willing to go without knowing what the destination looks like. Hillman says, “Psychological consciousness’ concern is with erotic identity within psychic relatedness, within the binding connection of love between humans and between the human and the divine.”

You likely already know how this all lands for you. To stand in the face of a vision you’d like to birth and say, “I do.” This is the coniunctio that holds Eros. It’s the temple where you begin to understand the nature of erotic living. It is a baptism into being fully alive. If you instead wait for Hades, he will come. Pluto’s not interested in staying in the dark. Pluto is interested in coming to life. The destruction that precedes life is in proportion to how out of true alignment we are. Hillman says, “A new life-form often comes before it can be understood.” If you choose erotic living, you’re dining with your shadow and you’re using something beyond cognitive understanding to move through life, something like soulful erotic embodiment.

You don’t need to be brought to your knees in pain. Please, don’t need pain to see your life for what it is. It’s a dangerous need to outsource your initiations to Hades made manifest through people. I know this well. Coniunctio is Latin for conjunction and I was born with an exact ascendant/Pluto coniunctio. It took me some time to become my own muse.

Meet him up here and pay reverence. It’s delicious to dwell in desire as presence. What do you want to enliven? What are you birthing? What’s ready?

Erotic living avoids the conundrum that is the new artist who doesn’t really want to be an artist—they just want the art.

The ancient Greeks said Eros, the creative principle, is the source of all life. We’re made through creation energy and when we’re creating, we’re most in line with our heritage at the quantum level of who we are. When we’re vilified for being in that energy, we’re being taken outside of reality. When we bully ourselves away from being creative or in love, we’re taking ourselves outside of reality. We end up dissociated and claiming pseudo-eros, small egos and various dark nights. It’s the ultimate gaslighting that happens in this culture that vilifies the Scorpio-Taurus axis and creates out of them Satan and his sister.

The wealth of the soul exists in images. Pluto initially meant, ‘God of riches.’ Erotic energy, Pluto energy, is the ability to have a transpersonal rich experience as a personal human. Folks with the transpersonal planets ruling their top 3 will probably be vessels for transpersonal energies more easily than others, but all have Pluto in the chart, and it’s this placement that hides the portal to where you can find the most erotic energy for yourself, so that you can be a place Eros lives. If you’d like to know exactly how to live into your own lush erotic life, email me and I’ll send you details on the Eros, Always birth chart reading I offer. It’s a written reading with a phone interview.

If erotic energy is destroying your life (break ups, situationships, getting lost in the other at the expense of self) it’s because it’s found a way into it and is hoping to initiate you into a full erotic existence via your romantic interests. When suppressed Eros finally finds a way to be in your light, your relationship becomes an archetypal initiation on a grander scale with grander repercussions. It becomes a place for a suppressed god to make himself known. It’s a far richer experience to enter a relationship as an erotic human than it is to be initiated through losing them and realizing then and only then that love with another doesn’t thrive when you are half-awake alone.

Connect with your creative instinct innately born in you, and when you find your capacity to hold the journey that it takes you on, and if you are devoted to whatever that creative instinct is shooting its arrows at, then you’ll be initiated into an erotic life that is uniquely yours. It’s a life with a rich luxurious interior experience of itself. It is a life of remembering the instinct hidden in the god spark that created you.

You’ve been gifted the divine ability to destroy and create yourself. Will you use it or will you let it use you?

soft moon rising is a reader-led publication. consider becoming a paid subscriber to support its continued rising.

quotes are from The Myth of Analysis by James Hillman and Through the Looking Glass by Richard Idemon