the signs as types of love
(check sun and venus)
eros (romantic love): libra, scorpio
philia (affectionate love): taurus, leo
storge (companionship love): capricorn
agape (unconditional love): cancer, pisces
pragma (practical love): virgo
ludus (playful love): sagittarius, aquarius
mania (obsessive love): gemini, aries
The Signs and Calamity
Aries: You used to be a lost and fearful thing. Cowering from the burning rain in some miserable hole. You awoke to the fungus consuming your legs. Now your strong, your limbs coursing with hypha. Now you hear your siblings and you are fearful no longer.
Taurus: You spent so much time hunting, so much time replacing the weakest parts of you with wires and steel. Your shell learned every instinct, every impulse, it memorized you, and while you rotted away the shell kept on moving.
Gemini: The king is gone and the great ports are closed, slowly being eaten away by a burning and sterile sea. Yet still you keep watch. You kick the bodies into the roiling waves, and try not to wonder if things could have been different.
Cancer: Why do they fear you? Why do they cower and hide? You are to give them a place in this world. To sort the dead and the living into their proper roles. To harvest the dead to improve the living. Waste not. Waste not.
Leo: You and your siblings fear neither the arrogant things above nor the hungry things below. All must brave the great nest. Flesh or steel, living or dead, your teeth do not discriminate. Your belly welcomes all.
Virgo: Your weapons have felled impossible things. You have slain things that cracked the very sky. As they spiraled to the ground, you couldn’t hide that shadow of doubt, your envy of their wings.
Libra: So many of you, tossed away from the world. Thrown into the deep places alone with so much other trash. You, and so many others like you, have come to know the rot as home, determined to embrace the lost and discarded.
Scorpio: The prison has crumbled and the prisoners are gone. All that remains is empty halls and cells. The ideal place to experiment. Toying with these remnants of life, attempting to build something better.
Ophiuchus: The pipes and strings on your back. You were made for music. Delicate things for the state the world is in. But you, you are not delicate and now you have all the time in the world.
Sagittarius: You left home for better things. To find a cause more worthy of your strength. A beacon you have been, a light in the dark, unshakable resolve. You dont pray much anymore. After all this time in the dark, god seems further away.
Capricorn: Damn these tales of old aristocrats, of kings and princes, of new and terrifying gods in the sub-orbital heavens. No more chivalry. No more magic. Life is the whirlwind of gasoline and lead protecting the weak and gentle.
Aquarius: You are an insult. A poor imitation of the brood mothers made by arrogant men. Even a poor copy calamity is hubris. This cage cannot hold you. None can.
Pisces: A rebel and a traitor, banished from the world for doubt, that deepest of poisons. And here so far from the world, in this arc. Here you met the old growth. You accepted the green mantle, accepted her rage at this new and dying world.
james joyce for the signs
Aries: “One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
Taurus: “While you have a thing it can be taken from you… but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then forever when you have given it. It will be yours always.”
Gemini: “Molecules all change. I am other I now.”
Cancer: “But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.”
Leo: “God made food; the devil the cooks.”
Virgo: “Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.”
Libra: “Absence, the highest form of presence.”
Scorpio: “First we feel. Then we fall.”
Sagittarius: “Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
Capricorn: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”
Aquarius: “You knew me once, but you won’t know me twice.”
Pisces: “Shut your eyes and see.”