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 clawed at Hercules' feet from a swamp and got stepped on — and find the same image every time. A creature that survives by going sideways, going underground, moving through what everyone else avoids.

For the descent, it's Mercury retrograde, so we do revision work. Thirteen weeks in, we go back through the load-bearing moments of what This Erotic Timeline has actually been saying — about desire, attention, grief, timekeeping, embodiment, Caesar, maroon communities, and the body's insistence on running on its own clock no matter whose calendar gets imposed on it. The argument is more coherent than it started. This episode is the map.

References: Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica (Poetica Astronomica), 1st–2nd century CE. English translation available via theoi.com: theoi.com/Text/HyginusAstronomica.html

Rumi, "The Guest House." Translation by Coleman Barks.

Keywords: Mercury cazimi Cancer 2026, Cancer mythology crab constellation, Karkinos myth Hercules Hydra, commitment and failure astrology, Venus Virgo inner critic, Neptune retrograde Aries, Last Quarter Moon Aries, circadian rhythm colonial timekeeping, This Erotic Timeline podcast, evolutionary astrology, IFS somatic astrology, body and time, Daylight Saving Time history, Caesar Julian calendar, New Orleans Black survival, Mardi Gras Indians

Book a session - https://www.amaliathecoach.com/

Music by Charmie Chandler - https://www.instagram.com/charmie_chandler/

Our favorite audio editor ever Chantal Defelice - https://chantaldefelice.com/ + ig @chantaldefelice

CHAPTER MARKERS

00:00 — Open: What Would You Fight For If Losing Was Guaranteed

01:18 — Welcome & Grounding Ritual

03:44 — Monday: The Hard Shell of the Seed (Sun square Saturn)

05:33 — Tuesday: In Due Time, Keep Training (Neptune stations retrograde, Last Quarter Moon)

07:55 — Wednesday: Productive Friction, Then Exhale

08:49 — Thursday: The Inner Critic Gets Political (Venus enters Virgo, Mars trine Juno)

13:43 — Friday: Oh, I Remember You (Venus trine Chiron, South Node)

16:01 — Saturday: Grief Is Not a Threat to Outmaneuver (The Guest House)

18:31 — Sunday: The Muddy Mythology of Cancer

23:13 — Karkinos: The Crab Who Tried Anyway

26:00 — The Question Mercury Is Burning Clean

28:30 — Transition: Thirteen Weeks, One Argument

29:58 — Clip: Time Organizes Reality (Episode 0)

31:08 — Clip: Urgency Disconnects Us From Presence (Episode 1)

33:37 — Clip: Deep Time Theory On The Human Attention Span (Episodes 3)

36:17 — Clip: Oil Economy Crumpling Deep Time (Episode 4)

37:38 — Clip: The Body Is The Matrix (Episode 5)

40:20 — Clip: Your Body’s Been Time Traveling All This Time! (Episode 6)

43:23 — Clip: Hours That Breathe, Then a Single Atom (Episode 7)

46:11 — Clip: Low Tech Timekeeping & The Incense Clock (Episode 8)

48:27 — Clip: Caesar Rewrote Time and Mythology At The Same Time (Episode 9)

50:47 — Clip: Empire’s Attempts to Write Black And Indigenous Survival Out Of The Future (Episode 10)

53:54 — Clip: What Clock Is Your Body Actually Running On? (Episode 11)

55:27 — Ending: The Show's Project, Stated Plainly

58:30 — Reflection Questions & Outro

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 migration. About what it means to build relationships sideways in a place the empire keeps trying to write into nonexistence.

This is an episode about blackness as an operating system, about maroon communities and racial ambiguity as resistance technology, about why a city below sea level might know more about the future than anywhere else on earth. It closes with Toni Morrison and the reminder that all water has a perfect memory — which means, on some level, so do we.

Content warning: discussion of the transatlantic slave trade, enslavement, anti-Black violence, and white supremacy.

References:

• The Guardian article (May 2026): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/04/new-orleans-sea-levels-relocation-climate-crisis
• Nature Sustainability perspectives paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-026-01820-z
• The Lens NOLA community response: https://thelensnola.org/2026/05/06/new-orleans-climate-relocation-response/
• Homer Plessy / HNOC: https://hnoc.org/publishing/first-draft/homer-plessy-and-black-activists-who-fought-segregation-all-way-supreme
• Juan San Maló / 64 Parishes: https://64parishes.org/entry/juan-san-malo
• New Orleans Historical, San Malo Maroons: https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/1403
• Free People of Color / 64 Parishes: https://64parishes.org/entry/free-people-of-color
• Bulbancha / New Orleans Historical: https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/1641
• Sylvia Wynter — see No Human Involved and related interviews
• Toni Morrison water/memory quote — from a 1987 lecture, widely cited

Keywords: New Orleans, astrology, blackness, maroon communities, Homer Plessy, Mardi Gras Indians, Bulbancha, climate crisis, Louisiana, Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, fugitivity, migration, mud, swamp, Venus in Leo, Cancer season, This Erotic Timeline Book a session - https://www.amaliathecoach.com/

Music by Charmie Chandler - https://www.instagram.com/charmie_chandler/

Our favorite audio editor ever Chantal Defelice - https://chantaldefelice.com/ + ig @chantaldefelice

CHAPTER MARKERS

00:00 — Water Has a Perfect Memory (opening) 00:57 — Welcome to the Timeline (opening ritual) 02:03 — Summer: All Info Is Good Info (seasonal grounding) 03:41 — Monday: Be Loud, Be Cringe, Be Fierce (Venus/Juno/Libra Moon)07:14 — Tuesday: Shut Up and Listen (Sun trine North Node) 08:45 — Wednesday–Thursday: Murk and Fog and a Spark (Scorpio Moon / Venus-Saturn trine) 11:35 — Friday–Saturday: Pick Your Battles, Slow Down (Vesta/Athena, Mars-Jupiter) 13:47 — Sunday: They're Just You (Mars into Gemini / Venus fire trine) 15:25 — Midway: Someone Called My Girl a Terminal Patient 17:34 — The Language Is a Choice (Guardian article analysis) 20:55 — What This Place Knows Is Black (thesis) 23:08 — Mud Is Black as Fuck (bodies are wilder than the categories they gave us) 27:35 — Swamps Are Black as Fuck (maroons, St. Malo) 30:41 — Migration Is Black as Fuck (indigenous land memory, Mardi Gras Indians) 43:18 — The River Remembers (Morrison close + reflection questions)

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 Babylonian mythology, through the Greco-Roman tradition that stripped her of darkness, and into the moment Caesar consolidated time and mythology simultaneously — removing ordinary people's ability to verify reality from the inside out. The episode closes on what it looks like to stop reaching for the hollow archetypes Caesar left us with when conflict or strong emotion occurs, and start following our darker emotions all the way back to where they came from.

Content warning: brief discussion of conflict and harm in community spaces, sexual violence language in communities (mentioned without graphic detail).

Keywords: Venus opposite Pluto, Chiron enters Taurus, summer solstice, Caesar Julian calendar, Inanna Ishtar warrior goddess, archetypes victim predator, community accountability, erotic astrology, mythology, timekeeping.

CHAPTER MARKERS

00:00 — Open: The Math Belongs to Whoever's in Charge 01:24 — Welcome & Arrival Practice 03:19 — Monday: Desire Gets a New Idea of Itself (Venus sextile Uranus) 05:06 — Tuesday: How Do You Want to Feel? (Venus trine Neptune, Saturn conjunct Vesta) 06:37 — Wednesday: The Teeth in Love's Mouth (Venus opposite Pluto) 11:42 — Mary HK Choi’s Case for Grudges 15:05 — Friday: Chiron Enters Taurus — A New Wound to Study 17:20 — Saturday & Sunday: Quiet Day, Then the Solstice 20:01 — Transition: An Archetype Remembering What It Used to Be 21:05 — The Descent: Ya Boy Caesar and the Calendar 29:08 — The Temple, the Goddess, and the Genealogy Rewrite 31:05 — The Story Caesar Chose to Control 33:17 — The Strongman Gets Violence, the People Get Venus 35:53 —How The Same Move Got Made on Our Inner Lives 38:30 — What We Reach For When We're Hurt 41:36 — Follow It All the Way Back

REFERENCES:

Caesar's calendar reform: Primary ancient sources: Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar (available free at penelope.uchicago.edu); Cicero, Letters to Atticus (references the Year of Confusion); Cassius Dio, Roman History

Caesar and Venus Genetrix: Wikipedia — Temple of Venus Genetrix: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Venus_Genetrix

Inanna/Ishtar as warrior-lover: World History Encyclopedia — Ishtar: worldhistory.org/ishtar Penn Museum / Oracc — Inanna/Ishtar: oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/inanaitar Hymn to Inanna by Enheduanna — Oxford ETCSL (scholarly translation, full text): etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section4/tr4073.htm Enheduana.org on Inanna enheduana.org/the-hymn-to-inana

The Inanna → Ishtar → Astarte → Aphrodite → Venus transmission: Sugimoto, David T. (ed.), Transformation of a Goddess: Ishtar — Astarte — Aphrodite, Academic Press Fribourg, 2014 — partial text at archive.org/stream/TransformationOfAGoddess World History Encyclopedia — Astarte: worldhistory.org/astarte Wikipedia — Inanna: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna

Mary HK Choi Subway Take: Subway Takes with Kareem Rahma — @subwaytakes on Instagram

Please note: The episode reverses Inanna and Ishtar at one point — Inanna is Sumerian, Ishtar is Akkadian/Babylonian. Corrected here for the record.

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 month of tension between adolescent joy and the forces that desecrate it. Sunday brings a New Moon in Gemini that requires a sense of humor.

In the descent: a global tour of low-tech timekeeping devices — the Egyptian clepsydra, the incense seal clocks of Song dynasty China, the Ethiopian Ge'ez calendar and clock (including the complexity of Ethiopia as a nation state and the history of internal colonialism toward the Oromo people), and the Marshall Islands stick charts of Micronesia. None of these devices try to control time. They're all just paying attention to it.

Links

Interactive Colonial Timekeeping Timeline — https://effortless-bavarois-314f8a.netlify.app/ Group Space Co-Design Poll — https://lively-marzipan-dfc058.netlify.app/ Join Group Space on Monday June 8 (free with code: IFWECANDREAMITWECANBUILDIT) — https://calendly.com/amaliathecoach/new-meeting?back=1&month=2026-06 Book a session — https://www.amaliathecoach.com/ Music by Charmie Chandler - https://www.instagram.com/charmie_chandler/

References

Apollodorus, Library Book I — https://www.theoi.com/Text/Apollodorus1.html Hyginus, Fabulae — https://www.theoi.com/Text/HyginusFabulae1.html Clepsydra of Karnak — https://egypt-museum.com/clepsydra-of-karnak/ Royal Museums Greenwich, dragon fire clock — https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-212049 Ancient Origins, incense clocks — https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-technology/incense-clocks-0017419 Time in Ethiopia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia Foreign Policy, Ethiopia and internal colonialism — https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/14/ethiopia-must-end-internal-colonialism-or-it-will-fall-apart-like-yugoslavia/ Smarthistory, Marshall Islands navigation chart — https://smarthistory.org/chart-marshall/

Chapters

00:00 — Opening 00:57 — Welcome & grounding ritual 02:18 — Announcements: timeline tool, Group Space 03:55 — Astrology: week overview 04:35 — Monday June 8: Mercury square Vesta, last quarter moon in Pisces 07:30 — Tuesday June 9: Venus conjunct Jupiter in Cancer 11:24 — Wednesday June 10: Chrysomallus and the pile-on in Aries 17:19 — Thursday June 11: Moon in Taurus square Pluto 17:56 — Friday June 12: Uranus square the nodes 19:37 — Saturday June 13: Venus enters Leo 22:30 — Sunday June 14: New Moon in Gemini 26:23 — Descent: low-tech timekeeping around the world 28:49 — The Clepsydra 32:04 — The Incense Clock 34:13 — The Ethiopian Ge'ez Calendar & Clock 38:09 — The Marshall Islands Stick Charts 40:42 — Summary & closing reflection questions

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 a pilgrimage goddess and matriarchal mother got compressed into the jealous wife of Zeus by the same cultural machinery that rounded down the lunar calendar. The descent moves into ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to ask why Western timekeeping uses 12, not 13 — and finds that both numbers have body bases and cosmic bases, just different ones: one from the skeleton, one from the trading hand. The episode ends in 1967, when the second was officially decoupled from astronomical movement and handed to a cesium atom. Transits covered: Mercury into Cancer (retrograde June 29–July 23), Sun trine Juno, Mars square Juno, Uranus conjunct Ceres, Ceres square the Nodes, Neptune sextile Ceres.

Key sources: Karl Kerenyi on Hera's pre-Hellenic origins; Sylvia Wynter on colonial language and humanization; Anishnaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Cree turtle calendar traditions; NIST published history of atomic timekeeping; Victor Warring on grief and the erotic (rewilderos.com); Alexis Pauline Gumbs, ed., Revolutionary Motherhood.

CHAPTER MARKERS:

00:00 — Opening 00:47 — Grounding ritual 01:56 — Week overview: a gentler sky, themes for all summer 02:25 — Monday: Mercury enters Cancer / what do we mean by mothers 07:54 — Tuesday: Mars squares Juno / Hera before she was a wife 14:19 — Wednesday through Sunday 19:27 — Midway: algorithms operate in time 20:06 — Descent begins: orienting the project / colonial time 21:23 — In the tradition of Sylvia Wynter / Patois as genius breakage 25:47 — Why 12? Ancient Sumeria’s lunar calendar 28:23 — 12 and the body: Babylonian hand-counting 30:27 — Two algorithms for the same reality 30:38 — The turtle shell: Anishnaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cree lunar calendars 34:45 — Rounding down: 12 vs 13 and the menstruating body 36:38 — Egyptian hours that breathe with the seasons 37:47 — 1967: the cesium atom takes over from the stars 41:16 — Recap and closing questions

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 to give you the time.

This episode traces what happens when someone uses that power against you — and what it takes to get your timeline back.

On the astrology side: a Sagittarius Full Moon asking where your hard-won knowledge actually belongs, Athena as feminist sleeper agent, Vesta making way for ecstatic chaos, and the Arachne story as a case study in truth-telling strategy. Plus Mars square Pluto, Ceres entering Gemini, and a week that wants you to get strategic about how you apply what you know.

Content warning: sexual trauma.

References:

• Jane Goodall, "What Separates Us from Chimpanzees?" TED 2003
• Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010)
• Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," Sister Outsider (1984)\

Music by Charmie Chandler Group space, 2nd and 4th Mondays 5:30pm CT: sign up here Book sessions: calendly.com/amaliathecoach

Keywords: astrology podcast, Sagittarius full moon May 2026, epistemology and trauma, language and power, Jane Goodall human language time travel, Athena Arachne myth, Vesta asteroid astrology, sleeper agents mythology, knowledge production, sexual trauma healing, somatic healing, Michelle Alexander injustice system, IFS astrology, Mars Pluto square May 2026, Ceres Gemini 2026, this erotic timeline

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 — Cold open: how do you know what you know?

00:54 — Welcome + grounding ritual

01:48 — Astrology of the week

02:33 — Monday May 25: Squaring up with the dark

04:46 — Tuesday May 26: Athena — feminist sleeper agent

09:02 — Vesta — the invisible hearth keeper who made way for ecstatic chaos

11:18 — Thursday May 28: Ceres enters Gemini — talk about the grief

13:04 — Sunday May 31: Sagittarius Full Moon — how do you apply your hard-won knowledge?

15:16 — Athena and Arachne: a case study in truth-telling

21:03 — Midway: Jane Goodall, language, and time travel

23:27 — Descent: the word epistemology and what it cost me

31:00 — Leaving academia, learning to walk on the ground

38:06 — Survivors of sexual abuse and the power institutions don't want us to have

41:17 — Holy shit! your body has been time traveling all this time

45:50 — What this podcast is actually for

49:01 — Weekly recap + closing questions