Devil's Pie Pt 2: Dark Sides Devouring the Sun
Rahu's Revenge and Fear of Death
This letter is the second half of Devil’s Pie: Greed, Materialism & Praise for D’Angelo. If you haven’t already, you may like to read the first slice first.
Greetings, beloveds ~
I hope you have a firm tether to sanity amidst the horrific; kindness amidst cruelty; access to light even as shadows are cast and revealed on the earth (hello, eclipse season).
In recent dances, I’ve suggested dry heaving as a timely and effective somatic technique. Dance moves for the Trump-Epstein era. Some toxicity can be metabolized. Some needs to be purged.
Disgust, sadness, anger. Betrayal is in the mix too. Betrayal by leaders and the systems that prop them up. Every day that passes without investigation or prosecution of those implicated in the Epstein files condones predatory assaults and further estranges many of us from faith in government at all. Betrayal after betrayal. And fear—fear for so many groups in our nation and beyond, and for generations to come.
I try to remember that the presence of malevolence does not mean the absence of benevolence. When we’re confronted with evil, it’s understandable to feel betrayed by god—the animating creative force of life. When children of the world are being killed by guns, bombs, chemical weapons, starvation or fetishized, raped and tortured by rich men, it’s harder to have faith in anything divine. For a few weeks, I felt my own praise practice slipping. Was it indulgent to spend time in praise and prayer at the altar? But in truth, it’s a lifeline. A way to listen, filter, find alignment, feel for what’s mine to do, to say…what’s my response-ability in these times?
In my time off, I’ve been flowing between Virginia Giuffre’s bio, Handmaid’s Tale, Monte Mader’s content (also on IG), survivor accounts, general news and tending to the German Shepherd Mama who gave birth to seven puppies two weeks ago.
As daffodils and peepers make their optimistic announcements of spring, my mood pendulum swings between appreciating the beauty and preciousness of life and the reckoning with the horrors that exist within it.
As maple tips turn red readying for bloom, I try to complete this letter turned essay. May the words serve. May you feel permitted to let your body dry-heave, shake, hiss or growl; draw your claws, show your teeth, scream into pillows or pound them with your fists. Set aside sacred time and space. Allow yourself a sacred temper tantrum.
Traumas are up. Our bodies often know better than our minds how to handle it all. Better to create intentional space for it than risk, as Resmaa Menakem says, blowing the traumas through another body.
If you’ve got a cup of tea and the capacity to read on, this piece wanders through shadow—eclipses and Vedic mythology, the dark corners of our own psyches, and reflections on eclipse-born leaders.
It touches the insatiable hunger of revenge, the sting of betrayal, and the terror of mortality. There is no explicit recounting of harm here. There is, however, a tender and timely conversation with my nine-year-old nephew.
Respect and love for the children. May they inherit—or create—a safer, kinder world.
Dark sides
A week ago, on the day of the solar eclipse, my nephew and I were chattin’ after school. He volunteers that one of the kids he’s sometimes friends with (you know, frenemy vibes) recently “saw his dark side.” According to Christian, the other boy had taken something of his and then lied to him about it. Christian describes—okay, acts out—grabbing the kid by the collar and saying, “I know you have it. Give it back.”
As Christian shares his third grade drama, he invokes the face of his demon so I could catch a glimpse of his fierceness.
Last year he was getting bullied a lot on the playground. Outside school, I witnessed a couple of experiences when he wouldn’t stand up for himself until he was on the verge of tears and ready for a fight. On the surface, it sounds like an improvement: clear, strategic, boundaried—even if still aggressive. But also I’m impressed that he’s volunteering what his dark side looks like, feels like. And of course, I love that he’s doing it on an eclipse day.
Then Christian asks: Do you have a dark side?
Oof.
I would have a hard time sharing this part of myself with even my closest friends—maybe even with myself—but I know I owe him truth. Like me, he has a fine-tuned radar for bullshit.
I reply: Yes, I do. I think everyone does. Some of my friends call it my “gangster” side.
He smiles.
I go on to share that my inner gangster had come out a couple of days before when I felt a sense of protection over someone else. And sensed someone may be being a little dishonest. When my self-righteous rescuer comes out, it’s rarely good.
Jonathan’s now come out of his office—curious—to hear if I’m going to share my biggest demon. With two of my closest people in the universe, I acted out a dramatized example of what triggers my dark side too.
Christian and I proceeded to talk about when these darker parts come out and the wounds these experiences conjure— what’s going on underneath the more obvious. I can’t imagine being talked to about these things when I was 9.
For both of us, the worst of our dark side peers out in times of fear. He recalled an instance of being ganged up on in first grade when he thought he was going to die. His options: run (which he has done a lot of; he’s the fastest in his grade) or fight. The darkness (at least what he’s consciously aware of) reveals itself as aggression, as self- defense. Mine also emerges from fear—usually a fierce protection of home, marriage, or work. But what I also noted about the story above is that hint of betrayal—theft and lies by someone who is an even sorta friend. Betrayal—or the anticipation of it—is certainly one of my core wounds too.
Later that evening, I carried the inquiry to a few women friends. Around a fire, under the darkness of the new moon, we spoke of our shadows too.
I can’t think of a better practice for eclipse season—naming the dark without pretending it isn’t there.
Thanks, Christian.
That conversation stayed with me. Not just because of what he said, but because of what it opened: the question of what the darkness is and where the demon LIVES.
Demon’s Claws / Devouring My Sun
It’s hard to parse whether the demon lives inside me or if it’s a force that flows through me when triggered. Some of these states certainly feel like possession. There are our personal wounds that get activated. But there are also cultural wounds with generations upon generations of harm that gain momentum and mass as they’re passed.
In a recent vulnerable and volatile moment, the cultural collapsed into the personal. Maybe I called it in from mine and Christian’s convo, but the demon came up. Triggered AF, my body took refuge in a corner, faced a wall, in full rejection of the male gaze. Avoiding any possibility of compliment or critique. In that moment, while greeting the contours of this demon, I connected the dots between powerful men who have trafficked and abused children and the industries that have shaped our cultural ideals of beauty and sexuality. Pageants. Modeling. Film. Fashion. The fetishization of youth packaged as glamour. The tendrils of this distorted gaze have sunk their talons into the collective psyche, skewing the filters through which many women and femmes perceive and value ourselves. Even if we actively reject them, they’re insidious. I’ve known this for my adult life and tried to reject them. But now, having read bits and pieces from the files and survivor stories, having actual names, faces, political offices, science research funding, stories, emails... It’s less abstract. The shadow has been lifted. Specific people are implicated. Now I know that the same men who rule the world have possessed me. In that moment, I felt a fierce and furious rejection and attempt to exorcise any remnants of this fetishization of child beauty and childish behavior from my cells.
In addition to moving these big energies (i.e. temper tantrums), it’s also crucial to be still and to witness them. Then we can get familiar with the contours of the demon's skin, the hooks of claws, and even the lies they whisper disguised as our minds.
When possessed by this much energy—this intensity of flavor and fierceness—there’s a force that wants me to burn the whole house down. That force—personal or transpersonal—would seduce me to devour the center of my own universe, to devour my own sun.
Shadow myths: Rahu’s Revenge
Devil’s Pie (see Pt 1) could be America’s anthem, an ode for the forces at the helm of this hungry nation. But these forces aren’t limited to America, the West, or modern times.
In Vedic mythology, the insatiable one is named Rahu. Rahu’s not the most known player in the planetary pantheon. A demon, or asura in Sanskrit, he doesn’t own a day of the week like his nemeses—the Sun and Moon.
In early Vedic texts, asuras were powerful beings—only later recast as demons. According to myth, the asuras teamed up with the gods to extract an elixir of immortality. Enemies came together to churn the ocean for immortality. Once the nectar emerged, the gods betrayed the demons and kept it for themselves. Set on getting what was promised, one of the demons, disguised himself as a beautiful woman to trick and distract the gods. (I’ll leave aside my commentary on that to keep the story on track.) Just as the demon was about to ingest a drop, the Sun and the Moon revealed his identity. In that instant, Vishnu severed the serpent demon’s head from his body. Betrayed again, Rahu (the now be-headed demon) was immortalized, split in two. Head separated from the body.
Betrayed, enraged and perpetually disfigured, Rahu pledged revenge. In this cosmology, twice a year, Rahu devours the Sun and Moon causing solar and lunar eclipses. Rahu’s revenge briefly darkens the world as the Sun and Moon slip under shadow. Rahu (the head and North Node) and Ketu (the body and South Node) are mythological forces, archetypal qualities and the mathematical points where the eclipses happen in the skies. Rahu was doomed to disassociation, never to feel satiation. His revenge will devour the sun and moon, again and again.
Wounds can ignite an insatiable fury and hunger that desires to destroy.
Have you felt that? Have you greeted the ferocious ones who would have you burn down your life when you’ve been lied to, disrespected, or betrayed? If you haven’t, may you not. It’s a force to be reckoned with. It’s a pain that fuels shame, unworthiness, unlovability, and confusion; it’s a pain of broken trust and lost belonging; it’s a pain of severance of social codes, agreements and the web of relationships we require to survive. As someone who has both betrayed a loved one and been betrayed by one, both sides of the wound are damaging. Lying fractures the psyche. Turns out that harming other people harms us. On the personal or the socio-political levels, dishonesty and betrayal are destructive. Broken promises, broken agreements, broken treaties, broken systems of justice destroy the the fabric of our shared world.
At an astrological-psychic level, Rahu is considered a malefic. Rahu embodies the energy of addiction— to substances, money, power, sex, revenge and so on. Rahu is ego who endlessly yearns for attention, adoration, fame and immortality. All head, no belly, Rahu has eyes to desire and a mouth to consume with an endless appetite. Rahu tends towards disassociation—estrangement from his own heart and body. There isn’t enough of anything to fill the void. Rahu energy at its worst reminds me of cocaine. Made from the Coca, the plant is distorted and manipulated to create intense, short-blasts of energy, confidence or euphoria for greed, and from what I’ve witnessed, leaves one only craving more.
In the sky, Rahu’s revenge looks like an eclipse.
On the earth, Rahu wears many faces.
Resistance to Return
Immortality is the desire that drives the drama and deceit on both sides in the Rahu myth. For most of us, death will always arrive too soon. We hunger for more life—for ourselves and for those we love. But I’ve sat with people who deem death cruel not because of genuine pleasure in being alive or love of this holy earth, but because of fear.
Fear of death plagues humans and gods alike. Fear of the unknown—a possible abyss, retribution, or nothingness (which is worse?)—that awaits everyone from demon to deity to human genius and all between. Yes, even gods can and do die when not fed, revered, honored. The dead die again when they’re forgotten. As the myth illustrated, even enemies will come together to conquer death.
What if our fear of death is THE root cause perpetuating the horrors on our planet?
When we’re terrified of our own return to mystery, we cling. We hoard. We numb. We kill to keep what we think is ours. We destroy ecosystems, bomb children, extract and consume—anything to delay the inevitable.
What happens when we tend our shared wound of separation from the mystery from which we came, of which we are a part, and embrace our inevitable return? Is death a remedy—a repair to the severance and separation that plague life?
Jeffrey Epstein reportedly wanted to be cryogenically frozen—his own bid for immortality, a literal Rahu move. And yet, we’re told he committed suicide in his cell and now lies in an unmarked grave on private property. People who transfer millions to offshore trusts, who believe the world is theirs to consume, who think they own the law, do not suddenly decide to end it all.
I call bullshit.
Eclipse-Born Leaders and Rahu Cycles
Trump and Netanyahu were born during eclipses.
DJT carries the signature as the greedy, insatiable, chaos-and-confusion-dealing, disfigured, pedophile-in-chief. With his towers, gold sneakers, bibles & ballrooms, crypto-currencies, and MEGA list of sexual assaults and cover-ups (view some previously missing files directly implicating Trump that surfaced last week,) From my albeit media-obscured view, Trump perpetuates a gross game of personal gain over all else modeling one of the worst versions of leadership and “man”hood I can conjure. Vedic astrologers describe the United States as moving through a Rahu mahadasha—an 18-year cycle where Rahuvian themes amplify. It’s fitting we’d have a Rahu-possessed one at the wheel.
These “leaders” are uninitiated men who seem to serve only their own over-inflated yet fragile egos. Under these leaders, revenge narratives are amplified and weaponized. Fear of death, fires of rage, and stories of victimhood are stoked, manipulated or disguised to justify theft of land and resources for greed and power. When betrayal calcifies into identity, revenge becomes policy.
Resource extraction, territorial claims, and even personal favors (or blackmail) entwine towards more war, extraction and continued colonization.
As these leaders conspire for more war (as I write, yet another eclipse-started war has been launched in Iran) let us remember that war benefits those who drive it, rarely those who fight it. Wars don’t benefit the lands on which bodies are slain or toxins are spilled. Wars don’t benefit the creatures, olive groves, rivers, and ecosystems who’ve been denied a voice or a vote. Wars don’t benefit future generations who will inherit the echoes of traumas enacted today. Or those they’ll take eventually take revenge upon.
Rahu and me
In June of 2024, I completed my own 18-year Rahu mahadasha. For the astro-nerds out there, Rahu is in my 10th house which governs public image, career, work, fame and leadership. This cycle has imprinted most of my professional life. Rahu helped me spin a hoop career out of nothingness.
Rahu is not all bad. Rahu is innovative and bold. With no models to follow, the hoop and states conjured spinning in its swirl became my guides. My apprenticeship with Rahu brought me into creative explorations, flow states, and ambitious projects. Thankfully, it went that way, rather than a full-blown addiction. Rahu’s reign brought creativity, connection with oneness, and an unlikely touch of niche fame. But as it goes with Rahu, there was plenty of pain and confusion. Ego inflation and deflation, and my own espresso-driven workaholism (hello, self-employed artist-entrepreneur!) My appetite for work was insatiable.
But thankfully Rahu’s not the only actor in anyone’s chart or karma. I don’t think I fell prey to the worst that Rahu can bring. Having seen extremes of addiction and egos, I enjoyed a pretty good, but measured ride with Rahu’s energy. Praise to all the powers involved with tempering the force to keep me grounded, embodied and in service.
While amplifying my creativity, Rahu brought some professional success, international adventures, flashes of insight, innovation, hoop trance, and ecstatic dance. Luckily, the hoop and dance kept me in my body rather than disassociated. In light doses, psychedelics became an enhancement to practice, rather than a main meal. Luckily, substances that took me out of my body and disrupted my coordination interfered with practice and became less desirable. With strong partners and collaborators, I turned visions into reality. And throughout it all, I remained grateful for and devoted to the greater mystery that had brought these tools for healing into my life in desperate times. I was humble enough to honor that something WAY bigger than me was at work.
Giving thanks and practicing humility is an antidote. Not a cure. The relational web holds when the demon wants to sever everything. The practice isn’t transcendence. But it’s a tether. It’s how I don’t devour my own sun.
The most painful part of my own initiation by Rahu was betrayal—by partners, friends, colleagues, clients, loved ones. Ego-battles and broken relationships. Exclusion from communities. Soulful projects and partnerships were born and died. I created grief ceremonies to metabolize the amount of loss from this time. Vanishing is the flip side of Rahu’s signature. I was acting out Rahuvian themes in my own way, and I also attracted people carrying that same energy.
Even artists often utilize Rahuvian gifts for good, but the warning persists. As Frankenstein reminds, genius endeavors can easily turn their makers into monsters. The desire for novel ideas and creative inspiration has long been fueled by drugs and narcissism. Fame, praise, idealization/idolization and desire for immortality through creation can also become addictive. (See hoards of famous creators in every medium.)
Amidst all this, plant medicines further obliterated my semi-comfortable worldview and blasted open a channel to the unseen that had been more available as a child—spaces where the living and the dead and deities mingle in our psyches, bodies, and relationships. Lingering ancestral wounds screamed making it hard to perceive the goodness behind them. From the micro to the macro, pain is loud. The good and the hard and the expanded world-views all conspired to bring me to where I am now, at Heartward Sanctuary, as a practitioner of ritual and ancestral healing arts.
And, one of the biggest gifts I received in a sustained spinning vortex was a glimpse of the beyond. This vision and feeling of where my soul would go after death that was so beautiful, I felt alleviated from fear of dying. There, in that moment, heart wide-open, I felt the practice had been teaching me how to die. That began my apprenticeship with death that carries forth in my work with death and also bridges connection with dance.
Luckily, there’s been a lot of healing from the wounds of that time. There was a greater karmic wisdom at work. When there’s accountability and repair; kindness and compassion; and commitment to growth and mutual respect, relationships can heal and even become stronger.
But some wounds linger and fester. In the absence of the former, relationships collapse. There are people I still avoid due to eroded trust, and what seems like an entitlement to whatever they desire and lack of capacity for accountability, repair or modified behaviors. The same holds true at collective levels. Cultural repair requires honesty and accountability, not erasure and avoidance. Repair is so desperately needed for our world to heal.
Undemonized
A couple of years ago, when approaching the end of this Rahuvian cycle, Allison Dennis, a Jyotishi (astrologer in the Indian tradition), guided me to meditate directly with Rahu — to humbly speak to the anthropomorphized, mythological force about how to relate with this energy in myself and my work. (Note: That’s edgy and was a personal prescription for me, not necessarily advice for everybody for this week’s lunar eclipse.) With a bit of trepidation, in the darkness of an eclipse, I greeted the demon, with reverence.
Within moments of meeting the malefic, tears began to flow. Immediately, I felt a deep and familiar pain of betrayal. Rahu had been manipulated and betrayed, disfigured and demonized by the gods. What made them any better? A pain of severance and separation; of demonization and disfigurement; of expulsion and exclusion. I and my ancestors knew some of that pain too. (Again, from both sides of the wound.) Pains this deep, they perpetuate themselves. I touched the grief underneath Rahu’s raging revenge and ravenous hunger. I felt tremendous compassion. The demon was suddenly… undemonized.
This force is alive in the universe, and in each of us, in varying flavors and degrees. Rahu, the disembodied head—and Ketu, his vanishing body—are seated somewhere in everyone’s astrological chart and psyche. I love, live and partner with another jyotishi (Jonathan Hadas Edwards) who can help illumine how that works in your inner cosmos.
The heavens offer a mirror through which we get a glimpse of ourselves, our shadows, our wounds, our shame. And if we’re lucky, and courageous enough to peer into the darkness within, they may give a clue to where healing, nourishment, power and true satiation may be found. It’s our responsibility to tend those hurt places and propensities in ourselves because each of us is ultimately responsible and accountable —in life and in death— for the company we keep, our actions, intentions, deceptions, consumptions. Even if we’re possessed by the immensity of the wound and act out—toward a person or a whole people—it is still our karma.
Underneath it all, surely our eclipse-born leader (and those who prop him up) who have revealed the worst of America’s wounds are, or are possessed by disfigured, disassociated ones. Underneath all the gross and harmful displays for attention, affirmation and power, is likely one in deep pain. And despite all the bravado, I don’t have faith that these powerful men have the courage, compassion, capacity or kindness to feel or heal. Whether a tormented inner child, or a lineage of them turned super-ghost-adolescents who cannot be satiated, I can’t help but wonder what unhealed wound could calcify into such hunger for domination. Whatever has happened, it provides no justification or excuse or salve for the pain that he and this cohort of powerful men around the world have caused through their addictions to power, sex, affirmation, feeling of supremacy, wealth or their fear of death.
Redemption and forgiveness
Throughout his reign, I’ve watched many Christians rush to invoke forgiveness. I’ve seen many Christians jumping to excuse Trump and emphasize Christ’s capacity for redemption. I do believe that forgiveness and redemption are accessible to all, no matter how wicked and wretched we become. But redemption and forgiveness come after recognition. After confession. After remorse. After repair. I’ve never once heard Trump speak of his own mistakes, trespasses, harms, sins, regret or wrongs.
Forgiveness without accountability is like consent for further abuse.
~ Chance the Rapper
Pedophilia and human trafficking are bipartisan, cross-cultural issues. Regardless of whether Trump and the perpetrators of all parties, nations, sectors of work are brought to justice this decade or not, I pray all of their karma will ripen—in this life.
May their waking, dreaming and dying breaths be filled with the gift of empathy— feeling the harms they’ve caused. May these insights come quickly enough that repair can be made, and future pain to others minimized, and justice be served.
And what about us?
Ever since that spin, working with death has become a practice for me. I turn towards it. Not with eagerness, but with acceptance. I pray for longevity and pray to accompany my nephew into adulthood. And yet I know (as Death says in The Sandman) that we each get what everyone gets—a lifetime. No more. No less.
As the eclipsed moon rises, may we be intimate with our own dark sides and curious about where our fears take us out of integrity. May we all do our part to heal the wounds, personal and collective, that keep us locked in cycles of shadow. May all beings know peace and true freedom.
with a fiery heart ~
Julia
Lemonade: An album of healing from Betrayal — great for a dance-tantrum
My Jyotish astrologer partner Djed’s eclipse piece from two years ago
Thank you for sharing this, much love and appreciation ❤️ Making me miss Heartward
Thanks for reading. <3 Miss you ~ Hope to dance with you sometime soon ~~