Way of the Trickster with Caroline Casey
What You’ll Discover in These 7 Weeks
In this 7-week course, Caroline will guide you through the fundamental insights, skills and capacities you’ll need to access the Trickster for liberation and move into a field of serendipitous synchronicity.
You’ll be guided in becoming unpredictable and bringing in the unexpected to liberate everybody from the choreography of what has been a highly predictable culture.
Council 1: Becoming Trickster Medicine Storytellers (May 8)
We gather for our 7-week journey, whose path Coyote unfurls before us, in late spring when Persephone has lit her candle and is completing her ascent up from the Underworld — and we with her! We carry the elixirs to heal the world.
We need not be depressed, if we go deep enough to gather our jaunty, spirited woof. Our willingness to be agents of the Trickster Redeemer magnetizes help. There’s no need to journey alone, co-operators are standing by! Some are mythological. Some are ancestral, fictional, historic, or in fairy tales.
All that has ever moved the human heart to goodness and kinship is made available. We begin calling in the Medicine of Earth’s collective wisdom and setting in motion themes that we’ll carry with us throughout our journey.
In our first Trickster council, we’ll:
- Convene our first Coyote Council of Cultural Influence and begin to create a resonant field of reciprocal blessing to support our dream projects, known and unknown
- Consider our lives as spiritual detective novels in which every quirky affinity is a clue to be honored
- Explore the Grail Legend, which begins, “The land is ill, due to the abuse of rank and privilege, and that people are living inauthentic lives.” Trickster Medicine is that which restores us to our authentic selves
- Explore “pragmatic mysticism” to tease from everything we’ve ever loved, studied, done, practical applications to make our own lives tangibly better
- Begin our experiment in creating a syncretized and customized Trickster, who will accompany us throughout our journey
- Invite in Scheherazade, quintessential compassionate Trickster who, through her plucky eloquence, saves not only women and the land, but even the tyrant who has hardened his heart. She holds a Valentine’s bouquet of stories whereby humans can be healed by the earth in order to heal the earth
- Start our practice of diagnosing the “news” — to understand what mythic forces are in play and become savvy agents of influence. The liberating hyphen reveals to us — dia-gnosis! (dia means “everywhere,” gnosis is “wisdom.” So all dia-gnosis is part of healing because it magnetizes the specific wisdom need.)
- Commence re-writing the world by writing witty head-lines that animate the soul — the desirable vision — for America and the world
- Big pertinent assignment: discerning the distinction between the Con Man and the Trickster. The former imprisons, the latter liberates
Council 2: Cultivating Reverent Irreverence & Compassion With Sizzle
Liberating Democracy (May 15)
Everything wants to be liberated from conditioned servitude into a way of life which enhances our vitality and serves the world. Reverent irreverence encourages us to toss everything into the cauldron — every spiritual practice, every strategy, every opinion — with the criterion “Is it equal, Mars and Venus? Humans and our flora fauna kin? Is the Trickster welcome? Can the truth be addressed without fear?” Yes?! We ladle it out. No? We throw it back in for another round of bubbling and brewing.
We’ll let go of repetitive patterns and self-sabotage and learn how to fully co-operate with our fellow humans, not only in our personal sphere but in our culture.
In this council, we’ll:
- Cook everything back to its originating impulse. What did this want to be, before it got hoodwinked? And offer ourselves as creative collaborators to that holy spark
- Welcome Coyote, who hurls lightning at the closed story-loop, opening the circle of constraining habit it into a liberating spiral of wild possibility
- Toss our addiction to having an enemy into the cauldron, along with our desire to punish, and ladle out a desire to liberate and heal!
- Learn how to navigate the Underworld when external support dissolves
- Reclaim the art of blessing, informed by the wisdom of Jupiter
- Gather our medicine stories to bless each person’s project that they undertake
Council 3: Breaking Old Spells
Taking New Vows With Saturn & Uranus — Setting Free the Past by Becoming Disciplined Wild People (May 22)
“Disciplined wild” is not really a contradiction. What we call wild nature is incredibly disciplined, much like wolves, which also embody inspiring models of leadership.
So we call in the wolves.
We all take vows, as young people, an assessment of “reality” and what we must do to survive. And they are necessary and useful. For a time. But then they go blub blub blub — into the unconscious, where they are no longer useful vows but binding spells. (We will also address, and rummage through ancestral vow and spells we may have taken on.)
When we gather in this manner, we can toss into the Underworld River all outworn vows and ladle out new more useful vows. Whatever we do for ourselves grants us the spiritual muscle tone to do that same thing in the world. Humans are sorely in need of breaking old spells and taking new vows.
In this Trickster council, we’ll:
- Begin “insourcing” everything we’ve been outsourcing and de-conditioning ourselves to become agents of principles — rather than subjects of laws — via the Gurdjieffian Levels of Consciousness teaching
- Liberate our discernment to quicken our strategic savvy
- See how to become directors of our own movie
- Explore the wonderful world of “complicity” and see, without shame or blame, how we are complicitous in whatever’s going on
- Inhale our complicitous creative chi from the undesirable, and exhale into the desirable
- Suck the “g” out of “kingdom”: exhale it everywhere — leaving us with “kindom” — the Kindom of Heaven is at hand!
Council 4: Dedicated Acts of Beauty Invite Power Into the World
The Dance of Venus & Mars (May 29)
The world is being destroyed by uninitiated Mars. Mars without Venus equals a hyper-yang death frenzy. Throughout mythological history ‘tis Venus who initiates Mars. Where there is war, let there be Art. Venus magnetizes and invites in the desirable then hands it to Mars to animate. (And Venus and Mars are not the same as masculine and feminine, for they both dance within us all in unique customized ways.)
Venus says: “If all war is a failure of imagination and beauty — then all peace is a triumph of imagination and beauty.”
In this council, we’ll:
- Welcome Inanna, whose 2500-year-old Sumerian myth contains the orbital cycle of Venus and teaches us that those who survive the journey to the Underworld earn the opportunity to be cultural Trickster Redeemers
- Discover navigational tips on what gets us through the Underworld when conventional external support dissolves. What must we die to, lest we die from?
- Practice loving disharmony back into harmony greater than existed before
- Invoke Venusian energy to magnetize what we desire
Council 5: Expanding Our Metaphoric Agility & Repartee With Mercury-Uranus
Sparking Our Imagination & Crafting Our Language (June 5)
This week, we’ll dedicate ourselves to the magic of language and the art of critique and blessing. We’ll explore spicy satire and compassion with sizzle. Let’s be surprising and thus liberating. There’s no prison for the unexpected. Linguistic precision guides the vision, and hums our mythological DNA.
We gather to craft our storytelling skills and strategy, that our language, metaphor, and story be in accord with our dedicated hearts.
In this council, we’ll:
- Liberate our truth-telling response and clothe it in metaphor
- Harness the power of Uranus and Mercury for new turns of phrase that open new horizons of possibility
- Access Neptunian qualities to reanimate the Aesclepion, Chiron’s healing cultural centers of antiquity, dedicated to dreaming, healing, and theatre
- Recognize that mythic figures animate the intrinsic intelligence in nature and honor them in a different way
Council 6: Becoming Artists of Atmosphere
The Neptunian Realms of Influence (June 12)
In this council, we learn to move the images in our mind in order to manifest external reality. We dive into the Qabalistic teachings on visualization and ways to metabolize the poison of the world.
We’ll cultivate utopian imagination (enough with the dystopian, we’ve got that part down). We’ll see how to create the atmosphere where the desirable can take place and practice Reversal Magic — sacred teachings of the Bunny Planet (see Rosemary Wells’ children’s books).
We’ll also consider metaphor as the incarnational garb whereby power enters the world and mythic figures are metaphoric animations of intrinsic intelligence in nature.
In this council, we’ll:
- Play with the possibility that the Divine wants to be liberated from past confines of human imagination
- Delve into the Qabalistic teachings on Neptune, dreams, visualization — practices whereby to efficiently move the images in our mind
- Practice “metaphoric agility”
- Let all natural facts be social strategy metaphors
- Explore how to become the person that we would have so loved to have met when we were 12
- See that suffering is not a credential, it’s an assignment. If we ever went through a time of feeling we didn’t have a voice, it’s not to occasion melancholy, but a clue as to our Medicine assignment: being a voice for that which has no voice!
Council 7: Blessing Poker — I See Your Blessing & Raise You One
Embodying Our Customized Trickster (June 26)
Jupiter proffers, what is the one way of relating to the world that is guaranteed replenishing and never depleting? Blessing! The art of blessing redeems everything in our lives and serves to gets us through the times when we must travel through the Underworld. Blessing does not mean letting go of critique, which is its necessary partner. We simply graduate beyond the dualism to see the intrinsic beauty in all things.
In this final council, we’ll:
- Gather blessings from all cultures that we may be agents of reciprocal blessing, “May it go well for you!” “And for you!”
- Learn to critique and bless
- Further practice the art of dia-gnosing and blessing. The latter conjures the wisdom the former needs to heal
- Embody our customized Trickster with all necessary skills
- Bless each participant’s deepest heart’s desire, that our inner dedication may magnetize outward opportunity
- Celebrate our graduation in which our customized Trickster with all necessary skills steps into our body
- Bless the world!
About Caroline Casey
Caroline W. Casey is the host-creator, weaver of context for The Visionary Activist Show on Pacifica Radio Network. Her guests are leading contributors to a culture of reverent ingenuity, all teased into pertinence, and has been called “one of the best radio shows in America.” Critique and solution.
She has studied and practiced in many Mystery Schools, Quaballah, Gurdjieff, Zen Buddhism, Zen Swordsmanship, acquired a BA from Brown University in Myth, Fairy Tales and World Religions, studied Grail Legend with late great mythologist Joseph Campbell and cahooted with late Jungian Trickster James Hillman — and more. What was academic to them, we can now embody.
Her unique art of astro* mythological* political* guiding* meta-storytelling is presented in myriad multimedia venues. Primary astrological consultant for Time-Life Books’ 1989 book Cosmic Connections, she has offered mythological-astrological news analysis on ABC’s Nightline, CNN’s Crossfire, in People Magazine and many other media outlets. She has written astrological-political essays for Washingtonian magazine as well as an astrological-political column for George Magazine. Her audio book, Visionary Activist Astrology is published by Sounds True. She is the author of Making the Gods Work for You: The Astrological Language of the Psyche.
Caroline offers Trickster Training Council weekly teleclass as well as councils at a wide variety of conferences all over America as well as in South Africa (presenting at the Parliament of World Religions), Bali, Sweden, UK, New Zealand, Hawaii, the Caribbean, British Columbia. A rousing and frequent keynote speaker, offering the Mythic News at the Bioneers Conference,(for over a decade), Green Festivals, New Living Expo, etc. and with the great poet-ally Robert Bly for over 11 years at his Great Mother Conference. Caroline invites us to imagine, conjure and implement a more lovingly ingenious world.
She continues her studies of magic, mythology, literature and social activism all over the world.
More courses from the same author: Caroline Casey
Related products
