The Red Thread of Eros

The world's wisdom traditions hold two maps of awakening. One climbs: up and out of the body, past desire, toward transcendence. The other goes down, deeper into the body, into sensation and desire, until the sacred is found inside them. The Red Thread of Eros follows the second map.

"The promise of Eros is not escape but entry, not going beyond but inside." — Nicole Daedone

Each of Nicole Daedone's contact pieces is a record of the mystical state as she lived it. The unity, the timelessness, the knowing that has no words: the mystics have described these states for centuries. Here they are told from the inside, by a woman who went all the way in.

The book is also a gallery. Sixty works by Hüseyin Özçelik, øjeRum, Michael Bergt, Margot Koch and Barry Mack face the writing page by page, and the poems of Joseph Massey are woven throughout. It is meant to be read slowly, the way you would walk through rooms of paintings.

In his foreword, Lama Mike Crowley writes that no words can carry an experience whole, yet a book can stir something we have felt and never said. This one sets out to do exactly that.

Hardcover · 7 × 10 inches · 336 pages · First edition of 250 copies · Ships December 2026