Caroline Casey – Liberating the Citizen Trickster in You
Calling all those dedicated to contributing your considerable gifts to the world… at this Time of Dire Beauty.
We offer you an invitation to joyfully participate in the wild ride unfurling before us, by freeing yourself from outdated habits and cultivating the skills of Trickster ingenuity: metaphoric agility, trustworthy intuition and jauntiness in the face of danger.
What You’ll Learn In Liberating the Citizen Trickster in You
In Liberating the Citizen Trickster in You, Caroline Casey will guide you through the fundamental insights, skills and capacities you’ll need to access the Trickster within you for self liberation, reciprocal blessing, and betterment of your family, community and the world.
Each session will build harmoniously upon the next, so you’ll develop a complete understanding of the practices, tools and principles you’ll need to activate Citizen Trickster in yourself and in our world.
Liberating the Citizen Trickster in You is a course in becoming unpredictable and bringing in the unexpected to liberate everybody from the choreography of what’s been a highly predictable culture.
Council 1: Story Craft
Becoming Trickster Medicine Storytellers
This is one Winter we need not be depressed, if we go deep enough to gather our jaunty, spirited woof. Our willingness to be agents of Citizen Trickster 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.
Neptune in Pisces makes available all that has ever moved the human heart to goodness and kinship. 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.
Council 2: Cultivating Reverent Irreverence & Compassion With Sizzle
Liberating Democracy
Everything wants to be liberated from conditioned servitude into a way of life that enhances our vitality and serves the world. Reverent Irreverence encourages us to toss everything into the Winter 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.
Council 3: Breaking Old Spells
Taking New Vows With Saturn & Uranus Setting Free the Past by Becoming Disciplined Wild People
“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 vows 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.
Council 4: Dedicated Acts of Beauty Invite Power Into the World
The Dance of Venus & Mars
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.”
Council 5: The Liberating Magic of Language
This council is dedicated to the magic of language and the art of critique and blessing. We’ll explore spicy satire and compassion with sizzle. Let us be surprising and thus liberating. Linguistic precision guides the vision, and hums our mythological DNA.
For example, we’ll experiment with replacing the word “trauma” with the phrase “my dangerous, beautiful assignment.” Our assignment is to make the Medicine from that poison. We’ll explore the liberating effect of replacing “got to” with “get to.” (“Got to” is out-sourced Saturn, authority turned into obligation, which of course creates resistance, while “Get to” engages our autonomous enthusiasm at the generous opportunity before us.”)
Council 6: Becoming Artists of Atmosphere and Public Dreams
The Neptunian Realms of Influence
In this module, 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.
Council 7: Blessing Poker – I See Your Blessing & Raise You One
Embodying Our Customized Trickster
The Power of Fierce Blessing, 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.
About Caroline Casey
Caroline 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.
Caroline Casey 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, Caroline Casey has offered mythological-astrological news analysis on ABC’s Nightline, CNN’s Crossfire, in People Magazine and many other media outlets. Caroline Casey 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 Casey 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.
Caroline Casey continues her studies of magic, mythology, literature and social activism all over the world.
