Cancer, Chaos, & the God Who Dies

A sacred path through madness, mortality, and transformation.

What the Mirror Told Me

One year ago, I was sitting in a cold, sterile room when everything shifted. The doctor spoke with that practiced calm that somehow makes your heart race faster. Then came the word “cancer” and everything after dissolved into static. I don’t remember much, only the sound of my own voice, quiet but certain: I still have more to do.

After that, everything moved fast. There was no time to grieve, no room to fall apart. Just a blur of appointments, white coats, tubes, needles, signatures. Radiation was scheduled every single day for seven weeks. Chemo once a week. There was no space for fear, just the relentless rhythm of survival. Show up. Endure. Repeat.

The first couple of weeks, I managed. By the fourth, I could barely recognize the body I was in.

Eating stopped. Drinking became worse. Even water felt like shards of glass tearing down my throat. Every sip was pain. My body began to shrink fast. Fifty pounds gone in three weeks. This wasn’t weight loss. It was erasure. I was vanishing.

They gave me medication for the nausea, but my body turned against it. Anaphylaxis struck without warning, my throat sealed shut, my chest locked, air vanished. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. The very thing meant to protect me nearly took me out.

And yet, every morning, I got up. I walked into that hospital. I lay back and let the machines do their work. Not because I felt strong. I didn’t. But something inside me, stubborn and ancient, refused to surrender. Even when I couldn’t eat. Even when I couldn’t speak. Even when the mirror no longer reflected anything I recognized.

And it was the mirror that finally broke me.

One glance and the truth landed like a blow to the chest. The eyes staring back were hollow, lost, the face unfamiliar. That was when reality sunk in. Not just the sickness, but the weight of it, the magnitude, the cost. The illusion of control shattered, and I felt the full gravity of it all crash down on me. I wasn’t just in treatment. I was in the middle of a transformation I hadn’t chosen.

It wasn’t until I spoke with a friend, someone who had faced her own trial by fire, that something in me began to settle. She didn’t offer platitudes or try to make sense of it. She spoke from a place I recognized deep in my bones, though I hadn’t yet put words to it. And in that moment, something clicked.

I’d walked the path of initiation before. Haitian Vodou had already shown me what it means to be unmade and remade. So her words didn’t just bring comfort, they stirred something in me. This wasn’t foreign. It was known. This was another threshold. A descent. A trial. A sacred transformation.

In the mysteries of Dionysus, the Bull is a sacred double. He is the god and the sacrifice. Dionysus becomes the Bull, only to be hunted, torn apart, devoured in ritual frenzy by the Maenads or Titans. Sparagmos. And yet, that destruction is the threshold. His body becomes communion. His blood becomes wine. He dies so he can live inside the soul.

That’s when I remembered the bull.

The one that came during séances. The one that filled the room with heat and weight, moved through my body, took over my breath. People saw it. Felt it. Hearts raced. The air changed. It had come before the diagnosis, rising through the veil, wild and undeniable. At the time, I didn’t understand.

But now I do.

Because when you’re enduring something like cancer, when your body is broken down and remade, when your sense of self is split between who you were and what you’re becoming, you are living the myth of the Bull.

The bull wasn’t a warning. It was a summons. A force of death and transformation. It had come to mark me for the fire I would have to walk through.

The Walk Through Flame

The Summons

Before the initiation begins, the god calls. Often subtly, through dreams, breakdowns, or inner unrest. Life is no longer stable. Something has been stirred.

Cancer Diagnosis

The call comes in terror, not ecstasy. A doctor’s voice. A test result. The body, your temple, suddenly betrays you. Reality shifts. You are no longer who you were five seconds ago.

The Descent

The initiate is led from the world of the living into shadow. Into ritual space. Into chaos. The normal rules dissolve. This is where Dionysus breaks you open.

Cancer Treatment Begins

Chemotherapy. Radiation. Surgery. Isolation. Nausea. Hair falling like petals. Your body is dismantled by fire and poison, cell by cell. Your identity unravels. Your strength is stripped. Cancer treatment is modern sparagmos, dismemberment.

Dismemberment of the Ego

In Dionysian rites, the initiate enters ekstasis, the soul leaves the body. Madness, visions, terror, laughter, grief. This isn’t entertainment. It’s annihilation. But it’s sacred. This is the essence of Dionysian initiation: being stripped of your name, your boundaries, your control. To stand naked before mystery and not turn away.

Cancer’s Psychological Toll

Depression. Dissociation. Anger. Fear. Grief. Hope. Rage. Delirium. You watch your own life like a stranger. You cry in sterile or empty rooms. You laugh too hard at the void. You become untethered and that’s where the god enters.

Communion with Death

The initiate symbolically dies. Sometimes literally. In Orphic myth, Dionysus is devoured. Zagreus is torn. To become divine, something must end. To face death is to touch the veil, and in Dionysian terms, that’s sacred. It’s a brush with eternity. Zagreus is the part of you that never died, no matter how much was taken.

The person That Was, Dies

Maybe your body is never the same. Maybe your future looks different now. Maybe your old self is gone. The person who never thought about death, dead. The child who thought they were immortal, gone. This is real death, even if your heart keeps beating.

The Heart Survives

In the myth, the Titans devour Dionysus, but Athena saves his heart. That heart becomes the seed of rebirth. The core cannot be destroyed.

Survival. But Not as Before

There’s a you the treatment couldn’t kill. The fire didn’t touch it. The poison missed it. The doctors don’t even know it’s there. But it’s real. And it pulses with godhood.

Return Transformed

Dionysus returns, laughing, crowned, wild and free. Not untouched, but undeniably changed. He has seen the veil and come back with power. Someone who’s been through death, real or metaphorical, often comes back carrying sacred knowledge, even if it can’t be spoken. They’ve seen.

You Rise. Scarred. Sacred. Changed: The body carries the marks. But the soul, the soul has seen the Underworld. You wear your survival like a mask and a crown. You move through the world as someone initiated. You didn’t just heal. You transformed.

In the Orphic rites, the eating of Dionysus the Bull was a sacrament. To partake of him was to internalize death, transformation, and rebirth. It was to know what it means to die and return different.

So yes, cancer was my Dionysian initiation. I walked through the fire, drank the bitter wine, faced the madness, and lived. I am now a vessel of the mystery. And no one who hasn’t been broken like that can ever truly understand what it means to walk back into the light.

Marked. Martyred. Magnificent. I was strong. I was torn apart. And now? Now I walk with the god in my bones.

Not everyone survives initiation. But I did. And no one walks out the same.

That’s the truth at the heart of the Dionysian mysteries. That death and ecstasy share a pulse. And that the Bull, once slain, returns, not as prey, but as Power.