La Petite Mort
Sex, Spirit, and the Sacred Violence of Mars and Pluto
Ceremonies, rituals, and habits all do the same thing—they mark a shift, a crossing over from one state of being to another.
We enter into these formal acts or actions to bring ourselves into a different state of being. They mark moments of transformation—something that must be enacted, not just considered or imagined, but done.
We practice dying because we know something has to die in order to be transformed.
We don’t often think about how spiritual the Malefic planets actually are, or how rituals themselves act as conduits to cosmic energies, grounding the intangible into form. Mars is the planetary representative of all doings; if it puts you in physical motion, that's Mars.
Dancing, cleaning your house, lighting candles, making a cocktail, getting on your knees to pray—even raising your hands to the sky—motion is Mars. When you're working out, doing yoga, hiking—anything that connects you to your breath is worship.
Pluto is the planetary representative of the Unconscious—a catalyst for transformation through crisis, particularly in areas of power, boundaries, control, and deep emotional processes. To tangle with these planets is to flirt with death itself.
Sex falls under the rulership of both of these planets—Mars, with its raw physicality and instinctual drive, and Pluto, with its capacity to strip away illusions, revealing the truth beneath power and vulnerability.
Together, they govern the duality of creation and destruction, birth and annihilation, the ecstasy of connection, and the surrender to oblivion.
How interesting that the orgasm is called ‘The Little Death.’ Sex is just as much of a ceremony as lighting a candle at your altar.
I remember hearing my parents have sex through the walls as a child. The sounds were confusing, raw, and strange. I remember lying awake, my heart thudding with fear, genuinely worried that my father was killing my mother. The violence in sex is spirituality in motion, just as its tenderness is too. In its rawness, it unravels the layers of the self; in its softness, it stitches them back together.
Through living these transformations, these rituals, these transits, we find ourselves simultaneously dying and being reborn.
Baptism through immersion is a great example of enacting death.
Me? I was baptized by a lawyer in his backyard hot tub. As he raised his hand to say, “By the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” my mother caught on fire.
But I digress.