Satyr Arcana · Essay

The Family You Build: Why Nostalgia Isn't a Weakness

By DJ Green Satyr

For a long time, nostalgia had a bad reputation in psychology. The word itself was coined in 1688 by a Swiss doctor describing it as a disease — homesick soldiers, basically, dying of longing. For three centuries, "nostalgic" was closer to an insult than a compliment.

Then, starting in the early 2000s, researchers actually started studying it properly — most notably Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut — and the findings flipped the old assumption on its head. Nostalgia, it turns out, isn't a disease. It's maintenance — a way of reminding yourself who actually showed up for you, so you can keep showing up for the next person. People who engage in nostalgic reflection report more meaning in life, stronger feelings of social connectedness, and better mood regulation during hard periods.

That's the engine behind the second half of the Satyr Arcana — the cards that aren't about loss at all. They're about the family people build on purpose, and what it costs, and what it's worth.

Card V: RIGHT ON

In 1998, new to San Francisco and knowing no one, the artist noticed a quiet stranger across a bar in the SOMA district, followed him outside, and ended up in an alley neither of them was sure they'd walk out of. Instead: a shared lighter, a shared pipe, and two words — "Right on." That stranger was Vern, who became a lover, then a roommate, then a brother, and is the reason DJ Green Satyr exists at all — he's the one who introduced the artist to the Radical Faeries and encouraged the whole persona into being.

RIGHT ON is nostalgia doing exactly what the research says it does — tracing the actual lineage of how you became who you are, back to the specific person who opened the door.

Card III: Mother to Them

Mother to Them is about a hospice volunteer who sat with dying men during the AIDS crisis — when much of the world had already decided they didn't deserve company. She rescued the artist from homelessness in 2005. This card is unconditional positive regard, the clinical term for exactly what it sounds like: care that isn't contingent on anything. It's also released a second time, in Spanish, as a bookend to the whole first deck — Una Madre Para Ellos — because some love is worth saying twice, in two languages, to make sure it reaches everyone it's for.

Card VI: F.W.B.

Co-written with the artist's husband, Wetzel Parker, F.W.B. argues that the deepest intimacy two committed people can build doesn't require merging into one identity — "the independent heart and the lover meet as friends" is the song's own description of the balance. This tracks with what attachment research increasingly shows: the healthiest long-term bonds tend to preserve each partner's separate selfhood rather than dissolve it.

Card XV: The Devil

The Devil is written with and about Eden Valkyrie Toxx, who survived homelessness and came out the other side fluent in exactly this kind of illusion. It plays as seduction rather than warning: glamour, intellect, and seductive misdirection — "chicanery" set to music. The card reframes "the Devil" as the person who's lived inside the illusion and knows the whole choreography of it well enough to perform it.

Card XI: Karmic Justice

Karmic Justice is the simplest idea on the album and maybe the hardest to actually live by: what you put out returns to you, eventually, without exception. It functions as a quiet form of accountability — the kind of belief that makes a found family work, because everyone in it is operating off the same ledger.

Satyr Arcana II's chosen family, continued

The second deck keeps building the same family out loud. King of Pentacles — Needed a Friend is a love letter to an ordinary friendship built out of closed bars and neon-lit nights — nothing dramatic, just someone who showed up. Mothers of Creation widens the lens even further: three women, one grove, raising the people who needed raising, whether or not they shared blood. And The Champion is written for the aunt who spoke up when the room went silent — the one who didn't wait for someone braver to go first.

None of this is about forgetting what's hard. It's about what you build in spite of it, with the people who actually stay.

Which one is yours?

If you've ever been the one who introduced someone to who they'd become, or the one who was introduced — if you've ever built a family out of people who weren't obligated to love you and did anyway — there's a card in this deck that already knows your name.

Thirty cards. Two decks. One mythology, still being written.

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