Adonis

In the land where desire and destiny entwine, a boy was born, and his story began before he even drew his first breath.

The Birth of Adonis

His mother, Myrrha, a mortal princess was cursed by Aphrodite for failing to honour the goddess of love. As punishment Myrrha was bewitched to fall in love with her own father, King Cinyras. In shadow and shame, she tricked him into union. When the truth came to light, Cinyras took his own life, and Myrrha, full of despair, fled into the wilderness - pregnant and alone.

The gods transformed her into a myrrh tree, and from behind the bleeding bark of that tree Adonis was born - a child of forbidden desire, of tragic beauty. Even in his first cry, the gods knew he would be loved.

The goddess of love, Aphrodite, beheld the infant Adonis and was struck by his sense of beauty. Fearing for his safety, she placed him in a box and gave him to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, to raise in secret.

The seasons turned, and Adonis grew into a radiant youth. When Persephone beheld him fully grown, she too fell in love. Two goddesses – Aphrodite of the upper world, and Persephone of the shadow realm – were now bound in desire for the same mortal man.

The divine compromise

This dispute rose to Mount Olympus and the throne of Zeus. He declared that Adonis would spend one-third of the year with Persephone, one-third with Aphrodite, and one-third he was free to choose.

The Death of Adonis

Adonis was a hunter, youthful and bold. Aphrodite warned him not to chase wild beasts, to avoid the lions and boars of the woods. But fate, like desire, cannot be outrun.

While hunting alone, Adonis was gored by a wild boar - some say sent by Ares, the jealous god of war and Aphrodite’s lover. Aphrodite rushed to him, arriving just as his lifeblood soaked the earth. She wept, her tears falling into the soil beside his crimson blood.

From this mingling - a flower bloomed: the anemone: fragile, fleeting, and forever touched by love and loss.

The Cycle of Return

Moved by Aphrodite’s grief, Zeus allowed Adonis to return - not as a god, but as a spirit of the seasons. Each year he would rise again, echoing the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. As a springtime god, his return brought flowers to bloom and hearts to stir. And each year, he would descend once more, into Persephone’s realm, into stillness and shadow.

The Astrological Soul of Adonis

In astrology, Adonis lives within us as the eternal dance between passion and transformation — the pull of love that creates and destroys, that opens the heart and tests its depth. His myth speaks through the meeting of Venus and Pluto, where beauty encounters shadow, and through the 8th house, where intimacy becomes initiation.

Each of us carries an Adonis in our chart — the place where desire awakens us to both pleasure and pain, to the power of love as a force of evolution.

Like Venus, who descends into the underworld and rises again as the morning star, Adonis embodies the sacred rhythm of loss and renewal. His death and return mirror the celestial cycle — the retrograde path of Venus, the changing of the seasons, and the Sun’s rebirth each spring.

Through these cosmic patterns, the soul remembers that even what fades will bloom again in new form.