This Erotic Timeline

In this week of the Ephemeris series we explore this week’s skies which are full of generosity. With friendly aspects to Jupiter and Saturn, we get structure to our drive. We focus on Saturn’s aspects to Mars and Athena, so we go to Saturnalia: the Roman festival when Saturn’s wool-bound feet were untied and the household hierarchy flipped for a week. Was that ritual a memory of a golden age, or a pr...

Venus stationed retrograde in Scorpio on October 3. This week we tell, in full and from a translation of the primary text, the Sumerian myth astrologers have come to pair with Venus retrograde: the Descent of Inanna. Inanna crashes her grieving sister's underworld in full regalia, grabs her throne, and dies. Two gender-nonconforming professional grievers made from fingernail dirt bring her back, not by fixing anything...

This is the last episode before a season break. This episode is all astrology, no dexcent, so you've got this month's important transits before this podcast goes quiet for a month. At the center of this month’s astrology we explored one question: what if relationship is allowed to actually change you, instead of just managing you or completing you? That question runs under a range of powerful transits that build...

This week's episode explores how moving through time doesn’t have to be a choice between counting precisely and crossing thresholds creatively, it's both at once. Bali runs two entirely different calendars side by side, one pure arithmetic, one built for ritual, and together they show what it actually takes to build a portal precise enough to hold you when you cross it: dawn walks to the sea, offerings at the cr...

No Cheat Code: What A Brilliant Calendar Didn’t Escape

This episode goes looking for a calendar that watches the sky instead of doing math, and finds one still running in Iran today. But it turns out an observational calendar doesn’t give us an escape hatch from state violence: the episode traces Iran's Solar and Lunar Hijri calendars from Zoroastrian kingship through the Arab conquest, a ma...

This week we’re stepping into the portal of Eclipse Season. In honor of that we explore the mythology behind the nodes of the moon, which get called the head and tail of a dragon. It turns out that name comes to us by way of a very circuitous journey. Chasing a question about where that dragon story came from, this episode traces it through the Sassanian Persian empire's centuries-long project to recover a cultu...

This episode traces the time scarcity we inherit through the mechanical clock. We explore histories of the mechanical clock from its first tower in 1330s Milan built by an excommunicated family staging a political flex, through Richard Arkwright's 1771 factory gates and into the American South of the 1830s, where enslavers added pocket watches to the whip as another tool of torture control. The through-line: every sys...

This episode traces the Gregorian calendar back to its violent, contempt-laced origins — starting with Constantine's 325 CE letter instructing Christians to date Easter independently of Judaism because he believed Jews were "afflicted with blindness of soul," and ending with Pope Gregory XIII, who celebrated the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of French Protestants a decade before "fixing" the calendar. The ...

The frightened body is fast — cortisol floods you, and it doesn't care what time it is, it just says move. This week we ask what actually constitutes a warrior's timing, and find an uncomfortable answer: the too-quick inflamed response and the frozen, collapsed one are the same failure. Both are a body that has lost its ability to perceive the opening in time. So we go looking for people who survived the unsurvi...

This week's sky is tectonic and tender — a Cancer New Moon conjunct Mercury retrograde, a rare outer planet harmony between Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and Jupiter, and an invitation to sink into what the body already knows. The astrology section moves through Ubuntu philosophy, the cost of self-protection, and what it actually means that a person is a person through other persons.

The descent finally ...

Capitalism needs you to believe that commitment without guaranteed success is stupid. That's not an accident — that's the design. This week's Mercury Cazimi at 20 degrees of Cancer burns that story clean and asks a different question: what would you fight for even if failure was guaranteed? To answer it, we go looking through Cancer's mythology — a Babylonian turtle, an Egyptian scarab, a Greek crab who cl...

This week's astrology is big — a Full Capricorn Moon, Mercury stationing retrograde conjunct Jupiter, and Jupiter entering Leo for a year — and the descent follows a thread that starts with a personal grievance and ends somewhere darker: the full history of who’s been taking the time from our sleeping bodies, and how it got corporate. From William Willett's 1907 pamphlet to wartime Germany to St. Pau...

Someone called New Orleans a terminal patient this spring. This episode is a response to that. We move through the week's astrology — a Monday of loud, reclaimed desire; a Tuesday of water-body listening; a Thursday of foggy ego-honoring; a Sunday where devotion, strategy, and want finally stop contradicting each other — and then descend into what New Orleans actually knows. About mud. About swamps. About ...

Caesar remade the Roman calendar and dedicated a temple to a domesticated goddess in the same year. This episode traces what those two moves have in common and what they cost us.

The astrology this week is all Venus: sparking with Uranus on Monday, dreaming with Neptune on Tuesday, and facing Pluto's underworld directly on Wednesday. The descent follows Venus's warrior origins across Sumerian and Babylon...

This week's astrology centers on Mercury in Cancer squaring a lineup in Aries (Vesta, Saturn, Athena) — a week-long tension between careful speech and urgent action, tended feeling and imperfect forward motion. Venus conjuncts Jupiter in Cancer for one of the sweetest moments of the summer. The myth of Chrysomallus the golden ram anchors Wednesday's pile-on in Aries. Venus enters Leo opposing Pluto, setting up a...

Something was lost in the rounding. A matriarch. A month. An hour that used to breathe with the seasons. This episode goes looking for all of it. The astrology section opens a summer-long invitation — Mercury in Cancer through August, with a retrograde built in — to understand and differentiate from the things that nurtured you. The week's maternal theme runs through Hera/Juno, whose pre-Hellenic story as ...

Episode Description:

This week we’re talking about language as armor, language as weapon, and language as time travel.

Jane Goodall spent 60 years figuring out what makes humans different from chimpanzees. Her answer: we can speak of things that are absent — the past, the future, ideas that don't exist in any room we're standing in. I explore how whoever gives you the words gets...

Your body is not a vehicle. It's a timekeeping system. This week, the sky is moving slow enough for you to hear it.

Episode 5 moves from a beautiful week of astrology —Mars into Taurus, Venus into Cancer, and a Uranus cazimi asking which kind of revolution we're committed to— into a descent on the Mayan timekeeping practices that have been changing how I understand what time is, where it live...

Saturday's Taurus New Moon arrives conjunct Mercury, the asteroid Ceres, and the fixed star Algol (the Demon's Head) at the exact moment the International Energy Agency is calling the current oil disruption the greatest energy security crisis in recorded history. Their recommendation: work from home. Slow down. Minimize travel.

Sound familiar?

This episode covers the full Ceres and Persepho...