The 12 Faces of Eros: From Pre-tragic, to Tragic, to Post-tragic Sexuality Paperback – March 29, 2026

Illustrated art edition inspired by Solomon's Song of Songs and the lineage of the erotic mystics, drawn from Dr. Marc Gafni’s and Dr. Kristina Kincaid’s A Return to Eros.Print-on-demand edition. Luxury edition available online.There are three primary levels of consciousness through whose prism we experience our lives: the pre-tragic, tragic, and post-tragic.Pre-tragic is the stage before tragedy. Life is good, delightful, ordered, and reasonable. We experience suffering, but our pain is not tragic. We can still explain to ourselves and our intimates what happened. Explanation saves our suffering from being tragic.The second level is the tragic. The goodness of life is broken by suffering, but we no longer feel able to explain it. The rules break down. Life feels empty and meaningless. We are overwhelmed by the tragic nature of life itself. Our joy mechanism is broken. We are cut off from the natural joy we once felt from the essential goodness and primal aliveness of life.But there is a third level—the post-tragic. Here, the person or, at a collective level, the culture, can once again participate in the elemental joy of living. This happens when we reconnect to the core Eros and aliveness of Reality. Post-tragic consciousness emerges from emotional maturity or wisdom. Part may come from depth work with our wounds, and part from letting go and letting God. Often, the source is the evolution of a more potent worldview.These same three levels apply to the sexual: pre-tragic sexuality, tragic sexuality, and post-tragic sexuality.For a lot of people in the Western world, pre-tragic sexuality is over. We have moved into the tragic sexual. The sexual revolution gave way to a world in which sex is no longer innocent. Hidden issues of sexual abuse, sexual violence, and harassment have come to the surface. With the loss of clarity around sexuality comes a loss of innocence, coupled with anxiety and fear surrounding sex.Today, there are no clear guidelines and even fewer clear values regarding sex. Hardly anyone is truly happy with sex. We live with rampant dissatisfaction produced by the tease of sexual satisfaction, which for the first time in history seems democratized. Everyone feels entitled, but few feel fulfilled.Puritanism lives beside promiscuity. We are confused by sexuality. We are not sure if we are living in a golden age of sex or in a rape culture. We no longer have a clear sexual narrative.This art edition, points toward the post-tragic—where we recover our participation in the elemental joy of living. We understand that the sexual models the erotic even as it does not exhaust the Erotic. We envision the sexual in its sacred wonder: full mutuality, fierce tenderness, infinite kindness, and trembling mutual joy. We understand that there are twelve billion years of Eros before there is any sex. We understand sex is neither negative nor positive, and certainly not neutral or just sacred because it creates children. “Sex is Eros” disclosed in all of its depth and grandeur. The depth of the sexual Eros discloses the nature of the Erotic and the Holy in every dimension of Reality.Inspired by Solomon's Song of Songs and the erotic mystics, these illustrated selections serve as meditation and initiation into the radical experience of Eros—the experience of being fully alive. Eros is the Impulse of the Cosmos toward ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness, intimacy, and creativity.Eros is the fullness of being alive. It is the joy of participation in the aliveness of all things.This is the awakening of the new human and the new humanity—the post-tragic world where all of Reality is making love and new hope is born in these images of the possible human, what we have called Homo amor. Read more