Our cat Habibi brought a bloody head of a rodent to the door for the Scorpio Full Moon. So of course, I'm sharing a story about lineage, shadow, and the wild magic that runs through my blood—from addiction to the adoration of all things embodied and occult.
Imagine this:
We’re in Rome, near the ruins of the cult of Isis where they worshipped the Great Mother of fertility, and the sacredness of our sexuality. But today, we’re in a café. You’ve got your drink, I’ve got a frothy cappuccino.Press play. Receive. Let it stir you. Share in the comments what bubbles up. (Audio above.)
I also wrote about it in my writers group last week and share it here below. And if you want to gather live with us…we have four spaces left for our Embodied Love Vow Ceremony in June Women’s Tantra Retreat in Santa Fe in June more info here.
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The Thistle and The Rose: A Blood Offering in Verbicaro
Slap. Slap. Slap.
It started like a heartbeat.
Six men dressed in red—T-shirts, underwear, and headscarves—lined up in front of the Church of Mary in the old part of Verbicaro, the birthplace of my father’s grandmother. This land still carries her scent, her stories, her blood.
Ten minutes earlier, I was sitting in a modern church across town. Jesus hung above us in his own ecstatic union with the Beloved. That wild kind of love, the kind that breaks you open to the core. I was flanked by two anchors in my life: my beloved fiancé, Harshada, on my left, and Nico, my similarly thunder-mouthed sister-friend, on my right. Our eyes were closed. We were somewhere between samadhi and sleep—hard to tell the difference sometimes. Isn’t it all a dream to the soul?
And then it came.
An impulse—raw, ancient, unmistakably feminine—rose from the uterus of the Earth straight into my own. She doesn’t whisper when she wants to move me. She roars. She knows. I stood. Without question, they followed.
We stepped out of the green-soaked church, where potted grass covered every statue and painting for Easter, and into the living pulse of the night. It was nearly Good Friday. 11:13 PM. The eve of mourning. The eve of the descent. The eve where Mary—our Lady of sorrow, grief, and aching wombs—reenters the river of loss.
And then we heard it.
Slap. Slap. Slap.
We heard it before we saw it. Through the crowd, the sound came like thunder through wet air. A ritual—older than the church, older than rules—was unfolding. I had read about it. How the men perform it only in the dead of night because the priests forbid it during daylight. Still, they walk.
The ritual is called The Thistle and The Rose.
Six men, barefoot, each holding a small cork embedded with shards of glass, walk the village. With every slap to their own thighs, blood spills down their legs. They move in procession for hours to mark each holy threshold—churches, shrines, the homes of mothers and grandmothers. They kiss each woman gently on both cheeks, then press a crimson handprint onto the stone beside her door. A sealing. A spell. A prayer to the lineage.
The village is silent, ancient, listening. Like many Mediterranean towns, Verbicaro is a winding map of cobbled hills, worn steps, narrow alleys, and clotheslines strung between windows. Grandmothers perch like priestesses above us, watching from their balconies. Children follow the red men with their phones, capturing footage, trying to record something too sacred for pixels.
We dropped into a blood-trance.
Nico, Harshada, and I moved fast, without speaking just meeting one another’s eyes from time to time as if to say, I’m still here with you. From shrine to shrine, Mary to Mary, following the trail of blood and wine. We watched as they poured red wine onto their wounds between stops, the liquid stinging and sanctifying. Blood, wine, grief. Everything offered. Everything received.
For two hours we were moved—lifted, carried—by something older than words. Like the angels lifting Magdalene into her cave. Intense, but with ease. It felt like walking a beloved soul from this world to the next, hand in hand with the holy.
My family no longer lives here in flesh, but still here in my blood.
All of it, an offering.
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