Guest Post from Scarlett Vaill
The erotic is not decoration. It is disruption, a sacred breach. Desire does not arrive politely; it storms the gates of the body, dismantles our defenses, and insists that we step into a myth larger than ourselves. To feel it is to be exiled from the familiar and guided toward the threshold where transformation begins.
Erotic as Threshold
Mystics and witches alike have always known what we call desire is not simply the pull of flesh, but the pull of the soul toward its own expansion. Carl Jung wrote of eros as a binding force, not just sexual energy, but the current that moves between psyche and spirit, self and other, shadow and light. Desire becomes the hidden door, the liminal crossing.
And thresholds are never without danger. Persephone gathered her narcissus flowers and vanished into the underworld. Psyche, desperate for truth, lit her forbidden lamp and lost the god who loved her. Inanna stripped herself bare to pass through seven gates, each ornament of power torn from her until she stood naked and undefended. Even Dionysus, god of ecstasy, dismembered his followers only to remake them in his image. Every myth whispers the same law: what crosses the threshold cannot return unchanged.
Consider Inanna again: hungry for the underworld’s knowledge, she descends. At each gate the guardians demand a surrender, crown, earrings, beads, breastplate, ring, robe, finally the last veil. She goes on, not in spite of the stripping, but because of it. Below, she is unadorned, hung on a hook like meat; the old protections are useless where truth is the only garment.
Desire works like this. It is not the lover’s hand alone but the law of the gate: you may keep nothing that keeps you from becoming. When she rises, it is with new sight. The ornaments she once wore are no longer proof of power but remnants of a life too small. We fear this ceremony because it does not promise comfort; it promises consequence. And yet the ascent is real. Eros is the rope and the breath and the first step on new legs. She returns altered, not prettier, not sweeter, but sovereign. To feel desire is to stand at such a gate. The world we knew recedes. We are pulled into the cavern where transformation waits, trembling with both terror and radiance.
Desire as Disruption
Desire never leaves life intact. It breaks through routine, shatters certainty, interrupts language itself until we are left with breath and trembling. The body knows before the mind can form a thought: throat tight, skin burning, heart stumbling against the ribs. Time becomes elastic, seconds heavy with eternity. It is both unbearable and irresistible, a storm that will not be tamed.
And the body goes on telling the truth. Heat gathers low; the throat forgets its ordinary work; breath miscounts the distance between moments. Skin becomes an instrument, a tuning fork for the unsayable. You notice the small rebellions: hands hesitating over daily tasks, attention drifting toward what is charged, the way a room tilts when a certain voice enters it. It is not decoration; it is voltage.
The body does not lie about what can no longer be postponed.
Mystics have always called this divine fire. Lovers call it chemistry. Witches know it as current, the unseen voltage that sparks spell and circle, that moves through flesh until matter glows. Whatever name we give it, the truth is the same: desire unsettles us so we might remember who we are beneath the armor we thought was protection.
Remaking the Self
Every encounter with eros is a ceremony. The spark, the ache, the trembling pull, all of it is initiation, a summons into another version of ourselves. Desire does not possess; it expands. It strips away the small self we thought was sovereign and reveals the body as a temple where shadow and radiance commune.
In craft, we call it raising a cone of power: breath, rhythm, focus then release. In mysticism, it is longing so pure it burns away pretense. Eros threads these worlds. A circle cast with salt and will is the body choosing a boundary so it can open safely. A candle lit is permission for flame to speak. A knot tied at the wrist reminds the pulse that it belongs to something larger. None of this is about possession. It is the sovereign art of consenting to become. Call it spellwork or prayer, the current is the same. This is why witches speak of sex as spellcraft, why mystics collapse into ecstasy when speaking of God.
The erotic is the current that remakes us, the mirror that reveals who we are becoming. What we chase, what we ache for, what we burn to touch is never truly outside of us. It is a reflection of what is already stirring within, demanding its own birth. To follow it is to be undone, to step willingly into dissolution so that we might be remade.
Closing Invocation
The erotic is initiation: a sacred disruption, a witch fire, a myth reborn in your own skin. To meet it is to stand at the threshold with nothing but your truth. If you are at the door, trembling, good. Thresholds belong to the trembling. Take what is true. Leave what is costume. Step as if the earth wants your footprint, because it does. And still, you step forward.
—Scarlett
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