The Red Dragon Returns: Tiamat, Sedna, the Zero Aries Point and Learning to Be in Relationship with Chaos

What if chaos is not the enemy of life? What if it is the potency from which life continually becomes; and the task before us is not to conquer it, but to learn how to meet it?

Recently, in a powerful lucid dream, Tiamat, the ancient Babylonian sea deity, came to me as a red dragon. And the red mattered. Because afterward I began wondering whether the red dragon; the terrifying dragon, the dangerous feminine, the monster that must be subdued, might contain a story about our relationship with the creative forces of life itself.

What if we have been afraid of Her because we cannot control Her? And what if the invitation now is not to defeat the dragon? What if it is to enter into relationship with Her?

Before Order, There Was Tiamat

Tiamat comes to us from ancient Mesopotamia, most famously through the Babylonian Enūma Eliš. She is the primordial saltwater, existing before the ordered world as we know it. With Apsu, her consort, the primordial fresh water, she gives rise to the first generations of gods.

And from that lineage eventually comes Marduk.

Marduk comes from Tiamat.

Marduk is sometimes loosely described as Tiamat’s son, but he is actually her descendant, several divine generations removed. His father is Ea or Enki, who himself descends from the primordial lineage originating with Tiamat and Apsu. The consciousness that eventually confronts the primordial Mother is therefore not something separate from her. It is something that she helped bring into being.

After Apsu is killed by Ea and conflict escalates among the gods, Tiamat eventually rises against the younger generation. Marduk agrees to confront her, but only after the gods grant him supreme authority should he prevail. He kills Tiamat and divides her body, fashioning the ordered cosmos from her remains.

Here I find myself increasingly interested in the story beneath the story. A primordial feminine being associated with the waters and generative chaos is transformed into a monster. The emerging masculine order conquers her. Her body becomes material from which the new world is constructed.

Whether or not we interpret the ancient myth itself through the lens of patriarchy, its later archetypal resonance is difficult for me to ignore.

Nature becomes something dangerous that must be subdued. Chaos becomes evil. The dragon must be slain. Matter becomes inert. Earth becomes resource. And eventually we arrive at a civilization extraordinarily proficient at extracting, measuring, engineering and controlling the living world; and increasingly confronted by forces it cannot control.

My experience of Tiamat turned this story around. She did not ask me to take away the red. She wanted to me to hold the red, to be the red. The fire. The ferocity. The blood. The sexuality. The danger. The immense creative potency. But she also wanted something I wasn't expecting.

Joy. Playfulness. Relationship. Flow. The Great Mother did not want to become less powerful. She wanted to discover what power becomes in relationship.

That distinction has been emerging repeatedly in my encounters with what I call the Great Mother. She wants to be tender and powerful at the same time, and, that human vulnerability may be part of what teaches this immense archetypal power another way of entering the world.

Chaos Is Not Disorder

Ke'oni Hanalei's recent work with the Pe'ahi fern gave me another language for understanding what I had encountered.

In his PŌHALA podcast from April, Hanalei describes Pe'ahi as associated with electrical-emotional CHAOS. He explicitly challenges the ordinary equation of chaos with mere disorder, instead describing it in relation to primordial intelligence or the Void; the precursor to the patterning of reality.

That distinction landed deeply for me. Because chaos is not simply destruction. Chaos is potentiality. Before something becomes this rather than that, there is possibility. Before the seed differentiates into root and leaf, there is potency. Before the new life, the old configuration destabilizes. In the adaptive cycle in nature, disruption is the most creative part of the cycle. Death is a disturbance, not the end.

Perhaps what we now refer to as chaos, is the moment when reality has ceased to obey the structure we imposed upon it but has not yet disclosed the structure becoming possible.

This is very close to how the Great Mother has been appearing in my journeys: not as sweetness divorced from destruction, but as the generative field containing both.

Kali Ma can be described in precisely this way: tender and fierce simultaneously, with creation and destruction belonging to one cycle rather than representing opposing cosmic principles. Tiamat coming to me, suddenly gave that intuition another body. The dragon.

Sedna at the Bottom of the Sea

And then there is Sedna.

Sedna comes from a completely different cultural world, and I want to resist collapsing Inuit traditions into Babylonian mythology or my own spiritual framework. There is no historical reason to equate Sedna with Tiamat.

Sedna's stories vary among Inuit communities, but in widely known versions she is betrayed, cast into the sea, and has her fingers severed as she clings to a boat. From those severed fingers arise seals, whales, walruses and other sea animals.

Here again: The feminine body is wounded. The body enters the waters. And from the wound comes life.

But Sedna's story contains something especially important for me. Sedna isn't conquered and then finished. She remains, as the goddess of the sea.

In traditions in which Sedna becomes angry or distressed and the animals become unavailable to hunters, the angakkuq, an Inuit shaman, journeys to her. In some accounts, because Sedna has lost her fingers and cannot tend her own hair, the angakkuq combs it for her.

Think about the reversal embedded in that image. The human does not defeat the great power of nature. The human tends the relationship. We cannot command the ocean to provide. We cannot conquer Sedna. We approach. We listen. We repair. We reciprocate. Abundance returns through relationship. That feels very close to what Tiamat has been communicating to me.

Uranus and Sedna in Gemini

There is also an extraordinary astrological backdrop to this moment.

Sedna has only recently entered Gemini, beginning an approximately four-decade passage through the sign. The Uranus orbit takes about 84 years and and the Sedna orbit is roughly 11,400 years. Their exact alignment in May 2026 has not happened for thousands of years.

Astrologically, Uranus destabilizes. It electrifies. It disrupts established structures. It breaks open what has become fixed so that another possibility can enter. And Gemini concerns relationship through exchange: communication, language, networks, perception, information, the movement between one thing and another.

Sedna brings another question: What happens when relationship with the living world has been severed? Can human consciousness develop a new language of relationship with forces vastly greater than itself? Perhaps the revolution is not technological mastery over nature. Perhaps it is learning to communicate again.

When the Waters Rise

Presently, our physical realities are sobering.

The August 26 floods in Nepal followed a catastrophic glacier and rock collapse and devastated communities along the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river systems. More than 1,450 people have died and thousands remain missing. Recent scientific analysis concluded that anthropogenic warming made the conditions contributing to the collapse more likely.

According to a recent AP article published by PBS News, Earth has lost more than 12 trillion tons of ice in just the past 47 years. The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is also retreating rapidly. Just this past week, the main body of the glacier’s central section has become activated and scientists are now seeing cracks in the middle eastern section that are making them very uneasy. The concern is that the entire glacier could break apart imminently. While the British Antarctic Survey says full disintegration is unlikely within the next few decades, with this years super El Nino, the glacier is being monitored closely.

These events exist within physical systems that science can study: atmospheric warming, ocean circulation, ice dynamics, hydrology, land management, development patterns and greenhouse-gas emissions.

And then, this summer, the extreme climate conditions came home, for me.

On August 1, the Spokane Complex Fires; Old Trails, Autumn Lane and Fairview, swept through my own community in and around Spokane. Driven by wind and extreme fire conditions, the fires moved with terrifying speed through landscapes and neighborhoods that people understood as home. Hundreds of structures were destroyed or damaged; whole blocks were reduced to foundations, ash and twisted metal. Weeks later, families were returning not simply to damaged homes but to hazardous burn zones, and recovery agencies were beginning the long work of removing toxic materials and rebuilding. As of September 16, the EPA had cleared hazardous household materials from 789 accessible impacted properties, removing more than 195,000 pounds of hazardous waste.

For me, this was no longer an abstract conversation about climate, resilience or the power of nature. These were landscapes I knew. These were people in my community. I watched firefighters, neighbors, public agencies, nonprofits and strangers move toward one another while fire moved through the landscape around them.

Fire reveals something our civilization works very hard to forget: we are not outside nature. We can build roads, subdivisions, electrical grids, emergency systems and increasingly sophisticated technologies, but we remain participants within forces far larger than ourselves. The question is not whether we should protect communities—we absolutely must. The deeper question is whether protection can evolve beyond an exclusively defensive relationship with nature toward a more intelligent relationship within living systems; how and where we build, how we steward forests and watersheds, how we understand fire, how we restore water cycles, how we design communities, and how we care for one another when the structures we believed permanent suddenly disappear.

Chief Arvol Looking Horse, Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe Bundle, has long spoken from Lakota, Dakota and Nakota teachings about ancient warnings concerning humanity's relationship with the Earth. Importantly, his public message has not simply been apocalyptic. He has emphasized interconnectedness, sacred places and spiritual responsibility, describing both warnings about the times we inhabit and the possibility of another response.

Relationship matters. Perhaps the Great Mother Is not asking us to save Her. For a long time environmentalism has understandably used the language of saving. Save the whales. Save the forests. Save the planet. But there can be an unconscious hierarchy hidden even there: we remain the actors, and Nature remains the object upon which we act.

What if the deeper transformation is relational? Not: How do we save Nature? But: How do we come back into relationship with Life? And perhaps relationship changes both participants.

That is the startling thing I felt from Tiamat. I had assumed humanity needed to learn from the Great Mother. But what I experienced was reciprocal. She wanted something from us, too. Not worship. Not obedience. Not sacrifice. Relationship.

Human beings know something extraordinary about vulnerability because incarnation makes us vulnerable. We love things that can disappear. We inhabit bodies that can get sick. We attach ourselves to people who will die. We fail. We grieve. We laugh anyway. We play with puppies. We make music. We cook dinner. We touch one another. We fall absurdly in love.

Perhaps consciousness embodied in finite creatures gives Source a way of experiencing tenderness that limitless power alone cannot know.

My notes from these encounters contain an almost comically simple line: the Great Mother "wants to learn how to be playful." I think I understand that better after Tiamat.

The Red Dragon Does Not Need to Become Pink.

This may be the most important part. Reconciliation with the feminine cannot mean making the feminine only soft. Tiamat does not have to surrender her teeth. Kali does not have to put down her sword. Sedna does not have to leave the depths. Nature does not have to become benevolent according to human definitions of benevolence.

The red dragon gets to remain red.

There is death in nature. There is fire. There is flood. There is predation, earthquake, decomposition and storm. Creation consumes creation continually. The Great Mother I have encountered isn't the sentimentalized Mother who promises that nothing painful will happen.

She is Creator and Destroyer.

I had already written exactly that before recognizing Tiamat: "This is the energy of creation and destruction. It is both. It is Chaos."

But now I would add something. She is also joy. And this matters enormously. Because joy isn't the opposite of chaos. Joy may be one way consciousness learns to move with chaos without needing to dominate it.

Play itself is ordered chaos. Nobody knows exactly where a game will go. Improvisation requires uncertainty. Dancing requires continual disequilibrium. Creativity requires relinquishing the certainty of the outcome.

Joy does not control life. Joy participates in it.

From Control to Relational Stewardship

Perhaps that is the civilizational threshold we are approaching.

For centuries, much of industrial civilization has perfected technologies of control: straighten the river, dam the water, suppress the fire, extract the mineral, optimize the crop, separate the waste, engineer the climate inside the building, predict the market, manage the human. Those technologies have created extraordinary benefits. But they can also teach us an illusion: that a sufficiently intelligent human being can stand outside the living system and manage it. We cannot. We are inside it. The alternative isn't passivity. It is something much more demanding.

This is increasingly the thread connecting what can otherwise look like very different parts of my own life. Biomimicry describes relational stewardship as a practice that can be "observe[d], test[ed], and adapt[ed] across different domains.”

Relational stewardship. Observe. Listen. Participate. Intervene when necessary. Receive feedback. Adapt. Reciprocate. Repair. And remain humble enough to recognize that the system with which we are interacting possesses complexities beyond our comprehension.

The Woman Emerging from the Sea

There is another image that has been quietly holding all of this for me. The Sabian Symbol for 0° Aries—the first degree of the zodiac—is “A woman just risen from the sea; a seal is embracing her.” I have always found this image extraordinary. Now, in the context of Tiamat and Sedna, I see it differently.

The woman rises from the primordial waters. She comes from beneath consciousness, beneath civilization, beneath everything we have constructed and named. She emerges from the wilderness of the deep; the place of Source, instinct, soul and the great feminine mystery. She is our soul-self emerging. She is the deep feminine returning from the waters.

She is our Tiamat.

But notice what happens next. She is not slaying the creature of the sea. And the creature is not attacking her. The seal embraces her. This is relationship. The human and the wild meet at the shoreline. Consciousness and nature touch. Form emerges from formlessness without severing its relationship to the source from which it came. For me, this is an exquisite image of the Divine Marriage.

I have often thought of Divine Marriage as the meeting of apparent opposites: masculine and feminine, consciousness and matter, spirit and incarnation, sovereignty and surrender. But perhaps there is an even more primordial marriage beneath these polarities. It is the marriage between the differentiated self and the great field of Life from which that self emerged. We rise from the ocean and become ourselves. But the seal reminds us:

You still belong to the sea.

This is where Sedna and Tiamat suddenly seem to stand on either side of the same threshold. Sedna remains beneath the water, reminding humanity that abundance depends upon relationship with the living world, and Tiamat is the primordial water, the immense generative chaos preceding ordered creation.

And at 0° Aries, the woman rises out of those waters. Not to conquer them. Not to escape them. To bring their consciousness into form. Saturn and Neptune at the Threshold. This is also why the recent Saturn–Neptune conjunction at the beginning of Aries has felt so significant to me.

Astronomically, Saturn and Neptune made their exact conjunction on February 20, 2026, at 0°45′ Aries, extraordinarily close to the zodiac's zero point. Neptune dissolves boundaries. It evokes ocean, Source, imagination, mystery, unity and the unmanifest. Saturn creates boundary. Body. Structure. Responsibility. Form. And Aries says: Begin.

At the very beginning of the zodiac, Neptune and Saturn meet: the boundless and the bounded, ocean and vessel, Source and incarnation. This is the Divine Marriage. Not transcendence of matter, but the willingness of the infinite to enter form. Not dissolution of the individual, but the individual remembering what they emerged from. Not domination of chaos, but consciousness learning to hold relationship with creative potency without either being consumed by it or trying to control it.

This is precisely what I have been trying to articulate in my encounters with the Great Mother. I experienced that the human heart could somehow “hold the unholdable”—that this immense energy could enter through vulnerability rather than only through raw power.

This also changes how I understand the embrace in the Sabian image. The woman doesn't emerge fully civilized, turn around and leave nature behind. Nature reaches for her. The seal embraces her at precisely the moment she crosses the threshold. There is such tenderness in that.

Perhaps the wild isn't asking us to return to some imagined state before civilization. Perhaps it is asking us to bring our consciousness back into relationship with it. That is different. We don't disappear back into Tiamat. We don't kill Tiamat. We meet Tiamat. That is the third possibility. And perhaps this is why the red dragon wanted joy.

The Divine Marriage isn't accomplished when one polarity finally defeats the other. It occurs when differentiated beings become capable of relationship without requiring domination or dissolution. That is true between people. It is true between masculine and feminine. It is true between humanity and nature. And perhaps it is even true between consciousness and Source.

My earlier Great Mother notes ended with almost exactly this paradox:

“I am not separate from Her…I am her in relationship with Other. I am her in relationship with Her.”

That may be the mystery contained in the woman and the seal.

She emerges from the sea so that relationship can occur. The One becomes differentiated without ceasing to be One. The wilderness becomes conscious without ceasing to be wild. The Great Mother becomes embodied without surrendering her immensity. Tiamat rises.

And instead of another battle between humanity and the dragon, something entirely different becomes possible. An embrace.

Differentiation is part of creation.

Traditionally Tiamat and Marduk is a story about the establishment of cosmic order: Marduk defeats the forces threatening the younger gods and becomes king.

But through the lens of the Great Mother, I find myself asking another question. What if Marduk’s tragedy is not that he differentiates himself from Tiamat, but that the differentiation becomes domination? A child of her lineage encounters the immense, uncontrollable potency from which he ultimately came and cannot remain in relationship with it.

Perhaps we misunderstood the oldest stories. Perhaps the dragon was never simply asking to be slain. Perhaps she was asking whether we were mature enough to stand before enormous power without either worshiping it or trying to dominate it.

Can we stand before what is uncontrollable and remain present?

Can we experience uncertainty without immediately converting it into an enemy?

Can we encounter power without possessing it?

Can we receive abundance without believing it belongs to us? Can we grieve what we have damaged without collapsing into shame? Can we repair? Can we play? Can we be joyful? Can we love something we cannot control?

The problem begins when differentiation forgets relationship. And perhaps this is why Marduk belongs in the story I am trying to tell about Tiamat. I don't think the answer is to reverse the mythology and make Marduk evil and Tiamat good. That simply recreates the same polarity.

Perhaps Marduk needs Tiamat, and Tiamat needs Marduk.

Chaos needs form through which to become manifest. Form needs chaos so that it remains alive. The infinite needs the finite to experience itself in particularity. And the finite needs the infinite to remember that it was never truly separate.

Consciousness discovering how to stand before the enormous creative potency of Life without either being swallowed by it or needing to destroy it.

That is relationship. And perhaps that is the myth we need now