The first Altar
Essays at the crossroads of myth and skin.
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The old stories are not old. They are the maps your body has been reading all along — the language underneath the language, the one that surfaces in the middle of the night when you cannot sleep and do not yet know why. The First Altar is where those stories are tended.
Each essay begins in myth and moves through the body — through the nervous tissue and the ancestral memory, through the places where the sacred and the ordinary have always been meeting, whether or not we had words for it. This is writing for women and men who are done pretending that the surface is enough. For people who have felt, at least once, that a story knew something about them they had not yet admitted to themselves.
Come in. There is a seat at the table. The fire has been going for a while.
“The jaw knows the difference between the silence of powerlessness and the silence of wisdom. It has been keeping that distinction its entire life.”
— from The Jaw, The Body That Remembers series
Series One
WITCH AND SEER
The body as archive. The voice that was asked to be quiet. The ancestral silencing and the lineage of women who knew things they were not permitted to say. This is where we go to find out what the body has been holding — and what it has been waiting to speak.
Essays in this series: Cerridwen, Ariel, Queen Maeve, the jaw, the witch before the fear.
Series Two
INANNA AND THE SEXUAL BODY
The descent into the full erotic body — not as performance, but as sacred territory. Inanna goes down through seven gates and strips off everything she has used to define herself. What she finds at the bottom is not loss. It is the self that was waiting for her, undecorated and whole.
Essays in this series: Inanna, Psyche, Venus, the twin flame wound, the body that knows.
Come to the table.
Essays on myth, body, and the sacred ordinary. Retreat invitations. The occasional love letter to the season. Delivered when the work is ready — not on a factory schedule.
The First Altar lives on Substack. Subscribe there to receive every essay in your inbox. Free subscribers receive all essays. Paid subscribers receive extended pieces, graveyard material, and early retreat access.