In May of 2026 I was lying alone in my room at Vaidyagrama in Coimbatore, deep in a panchakarma retreat, reading Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey. My body was exhausted and softened by treatment, stripped of its usual defences. Somewhere in those pages, a voice rose up from inside me with a very clear instruction: Tell your story of the work you did with men.
Today, that story is out in the world.
When Eros Overthrows an Empire began as a memoir of my six years practising as a Tantric Dakini. By the third day of writing, the pages had started instructing me. My memories braided themselves with theology, psychology, mysticism and the unspoken shadow of Western culture, and the book became an autotheory: a map of Eros herself, sacred, suppressed, distorted, and still pulsing beneath the surface of our civilisation.
“The more we suppress desire, the more distorted it becomes. The more we shame sexuality, the more dangerous it grows. The more we exile Eros, the more violently she returns.”
The first half of the book names the poison, following the logic of suppression from Rome to the present day, through the imperial psyche and into the collective shadow. The second half asks the harder question of what it would mean to actually meet this force. It walks through the Six Gates of Return, from coming home to the body and meeting the shadow, through sacred sexuality and the artist’s way, to the return of prayer and ritual.
The book carries a foreword by Jon Eden Khan and an invocation written for it by Bruce Lyon. It is the second book in my series The Body Gospels, a four-part series that moves from the civilisational to the intimate. This first volume holds the widest lens. Each one that follows moves closer: to the body, to the room, to the breath.
“Quiet. Persistent. Unmistakable. Something is returning.”
With love,
Sigourney X
