Chthonic AF: Unearthing Myths of Power, Sacred Rage, and the Monstrous Feminine
An Online Course Led by Mariola Rosario
Scorpio Season 2026 · Beginning October 23
Now in its third year
Now in its third year
To be chthonic is to be of the earth, of roots, buried things, and cycles of death and return. The chthonic holds our bones. It is also the part of us that rages in the face of injustice. Primordial, mysterious, powerful, and unsettling.
There is a stench to the chthonic. A particular funk in the air. Teeth. Hisses. Howls. Rotted, juicy fruit. A musky darkness laced with an irresistible, pulsing call to life.
In Chthonic AF, we enter the underlands as part of a living lineage. A continuum of myth, power, rage, and reclamation. These stories have travelled through centuries of retelling, bearing the marks of those who told them and those whose versions were buried. We excavate, untangle, question, and follow the red thread.
Now in its third year, my signature course returns for Scorpio season with Medusa and the Sirens as our primary monstrous guides, joined by a new exploration of chthonic Venus.
This is a month-long, primarily self-paced course, with a rich collection of recorded teachings and creative practices to explore in your own rhythm. We’ll meet for three live gatherings, including the new two-hour workshop: Venus Looks Back: The Many Gazes and Many Bodies of the Goddess.
Gustave Moreau, Venus Rising from the Sea, 1866
OUR MONSTROUS GUIDES
Medusa and the Sirens dwell in the uneasy territory between fear and desire. Their stories invite questions about who gets called monstrous and whose power becomes a threat. What happens when a body or a voice refuses the role assigned to it?
They surface again and again in feminist, queer, and decolonial retellings. We’ll explore these interpretations while attending to the histories of violence the myths carry. Their questions remain urgent in a world where violence against women, trans, nonbinary, racialized, and other marginalized people is normalized and weaponized as a means of control and dehumanization.
Medusa and the Sirens draw us into the realms of perception: sight and sound, gaze and voice, as sites of power, pleasure, danger, and disruption.
What does it mean to be seen, or to petrify with a look?
What is the voice capable of, once unbound? When it seduces, screams, sings, or curses?
What makes a monster?
Their myths thrum with sensorial tension: the petrifying gaze, the deadly song, the risk of too much visibility or too much voice. How many of us have been cast as too much? Too loud. Too soft. Too unruly. Too strange. Too alive.
Through their eyes and mouths, we will question:
What happens when we gaze back?
What kinds of voices are punished, silenced, mythologized, severed, lost?
How do sound and vision carry both seduction and resistance?
What happens when the monster speaks?
NEW THIS YEAR
2-hour Workshop: Venus Looks Back: The Many Gazes and Many Bodies of the Goddess
This edition brings Venus into our chthonic terrain, expanding our inquiry into the gaze through the bodies and images of the goddess.
We’ll explore how artists have depicted the goddess and what those images teach us to desire. Whose body becomes Venus? Who is looking, and whose pleasure organizes the scene? What happens when the goddess looks back? Spoiler alert: she always does.
Moving between art history and astrology, we’ll consider how these depictions correspond, or fail to correspond, to astrological Venus. The goddess acquires different meanings in different hands. We’ll look closely at the conditions under which her images were made and ask what we bring to them as viewers today.
Venus retrograde accompanies much of our course, offering a frame for returning to inherited images of beauty, love, relationality, values, and the desires attached to them. Our exploration of chthonic Venus brings pleasure into contact with mortality and inquires what becomes of "the venusian" in the underworld.
This two-hour live workshop takes place on November 6 and is included in full Chthonic AF enrollment. It is also open to standalone participants at a different rate.
The Truth, Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1870)
original painting: Odalisque, Francois Boucher (c.1749)
THE TERRAIN WE’LL TRAVEL
The Monstrous Scorpio–Taurus polarity
The Scorpio–Taurus polarity provides the ground beneath the course. We’ll explore the body and what sustains it, our attachments to what we love, and the losses through which our relationships to life change.
Alongside our principal guides, Persephone and Demeter enter through the lunar rituals. Both lunar rituals offer moments to pause and work with the season in your own space.
Artist highlights accompany the mythological teachings, while creative contemplations invite you to respond through whatever materials call to you. You can write, make an image, work with your voice, or take a question into your everyday surroundings.
We’ll move through mythology, astrology, tarot, visual culture, and monster theory. You can expect invitations into punk-scholarly inquiry and embodied, creative practice.
HOW THE COURSE UNFOLDS
This is a hybrid space, part lecture series, part ritual ground.
The bulk of the course is self-paced, drawing on a substantial collection of rich recorded material. You can listen, revisit, and follow the threads that catch your attention. You can also choose to listen at a later time.
You’ll have access to all course recordings and materials through February 20, 2027, three months after our closing gathering. There’s time to follow the course during Scorpio season and return to what calls you afterward.
A creative map offers a suggested route through the course. It will help you locate the teachings and their accompanying practices, with space to mark your own discoveries. You don’t have to complete everything to participate meaningfully. This is your adventure into the chthonic underlands.
Our three live Zoom gatherings create opportunities to meet and work with the material together. You’ll be invited to bring questions and share reflections and also, follow along as you wish. This includes following in silence, from your cave, at your own time etc.
All live sessions will be recorded. Nothing is mandatory. Enter as you wish. Play how you want. Engage in the ways that feel most alive or accessible to you.
Live attendance is encouraged when possible. It is fun and powerful to gather and create together.
Slides examples from Chthonic AF presentations. I absolutely love and live for making a good slide. Here is a taste.
WHAT’S INCLUDED
-Three live Zoom gatherings, with recordings: a 90-minute opening, the two-hour Venus workshop, and a 90-minute closing.
-Recorded mythological teachings and retellings, including Medusa and the Sirens.
-Teachings on the monstrous Scorpio–Taurus polarity.
-Artist highlights
-Two recorded lunar rituals for the Full and New Moons.
-Opening and closing tarot spreads.
-Creative exercises and contemplations.
-A creative map to guide your course journey.
-Bibliography and practitioner resource list.
-An online community space.
Another sample from a course slide, on monstrosity
WHO IS THIS FOR?
For those drawn to myth, mystery, alternative routes for critical and creative thinking, and embodied inquiry. For those who feel an affinity with the monstrous, the exiled, and the unruly. For artists and rogue scholars who want to approach these stories through poetic and political practice.
People of all genders are welcome. We’ll examine how the femme and monstrosity have been constructed together, making room for different relationships to gender and different experiences of these myths.
The creatures we study trouble familiar boundaries between human, animal, and divine. We’ll follow those disturbances while asking whose authority defines the boundaries in the first place.
No prior knowledge of astrology, mythology or art is required. Come as you are.
The Bat Woman (La Femme Chauve-Souris), Albert Joseph Pénot (c.1890)
LIVE GATHERINGS
The course opens on Friday, October 23, 2026, as we enter Scorpio season. Recordings are provided for every live gathering. The New and Full Moon rituals are recorded practices you can follow in your own time.
EXCHANGE & TUITION
€150 · Regular enrollment
€135 · Community rate for paid Substack subscribers and alumni of my other Studio Solar courses
€80 · Returning participants from any previous Chthonic AF editions (2024-2026)
€135 · Community rate for paid Substack subscribers and alumni of my other Studio Solar courses
€80 · Returning participants from any previous Chthonic AF editions (2024-2026)
All full-course rates include the Venus workshop.
Emails will be sent to all alumni with their specific discount codes. Feel free to reach out if you did not receive your code.
RETURNING CHTHONIC STUDENT? WELCOME BACK.
If you’ve taken Chthonic AF before, you are invited to return at the €80 Chthonic alumni rate.
Yes, there will be echoes. Much of the recorded Scorpio material will be familiar. This year, you’ll encounter it alongside the new chthonic Venus workshop and a creative map, with live gatherings to accompany your return.
The myths may still be the same, but you are not, and that changes everything, doesn't it? Who are you now at this moment of return?
Repetition is ritual.
If you joined us for a Taurus edition, Scorpio invites you to explore the other side of the axis. Where Taurus rooted us in matter, pleasure, and survival, Scorpio calls us into loss, transformation, and power. These poles speak to each other. Come explore their tension.
JOIN VENUS LOOKS BACK ON ITS OWN
You can attend Venus Looks Back: The Many Gazes and Many Bodies of the Goddess without enrolling in the full course.
€40 includes the two-hour live workshop on Friday, November 6, and its recording.
If you’re enrolled in Chthonic AF 2026, this workshop is already included.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Venus and Cupid (Sleeping Venus), c. 1625–1630
MEET YOUR COURSE GUIDE
I’m Mariola. I’m an artist, astrologer, teacher, and researcher from Puerto Rico, currently based in Paris.
I explore visual and material culture in relation to myths of sky and earth. I am fascinated with tracing how images, objects, languages shape our cultural memory, our political imaginaries, and our relationships to power.
I care about creating collaborative spaces of learning, where study, criticality, and imagination can honor both the magical and the material conditions of our time. I am also deeply committed to having fun!
My Scorpio stellium includes my Sun, Mercury, Saturn, and Pluto, with Scorpio rising. Chthonic AF!
Now in my third year of teaching this course, I continue to find more to question in these stories. The artworks I encounter change how I read them, and so do the conversations we have together. I look forward to seeing where this year’s descent takes us.
Words from alumni about their CHTHONIC AF EXPERIENCE:
This course is an invitation to engage with chthonic mythology, visual culture, and creative practices in a way that is both personal and transformative. Whether you are drawn to the power of these ancient myths, the call of Scorpio or curious about the underworld archetypes that live within all of us, Chthonic AF is designed to offer a space for deep exploration, contemplation, play, reflection, and creative growth.
Note: This course is open to everyone—all genders are welcome, and no prior knowledge of mythology or astrology is required. This is a space of inclusivity and collaboration.