You are not one thing entire, but a whole vast continent at once. Daughter of the sun, bride of the sea, know yourself immortal and unending, a mere sojourner in this world of flesh and of desires.

They will break you. That is what it is to be in the world: to break a little more each day, to crumble slowly toward that dark soil that is flesh’s true inheritor. Be afraid, be brave: they will tell truths about you, monstrous truths. Know yourself untouchable, forever saved, forever clean and unforgivable. You are above everything, still riding proudly behind the horses of the sun, even bent beneath the ocean’s back; you shall be cursed with double-vision.

Desire, they will call it; animal lust. You who were born to be a god they will rope and ride like any other cattle. What do they know of fertility, of the colossal acts of love that churns mud into men and trees into women? Whose rich seed overflows its banks and returns the fields to life? Your children will be monsters and fratricides, as they must, as they are needed.

Pasiphae: daughter, queen, bride, mother, judge. You were born to suffer, as were we all, but created to endure.