Caroline Casey – Way of the Trickster

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

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

“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!

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

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

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!

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!

Caroline Casey converses with one of her favorite humans, Max Dashu, who embodies the scholarship to which she has been dedicated for over 40 years, the suppressed archives of women’s power. Tales of shamanism, priestesses, the war on reverence — that began so long ago, and now is at another height. Until now! May we all be the antidote to the poison in the world, by embracing our “weird” — our destiny unfurling before us whereby to cultivate, animate and contribute our unique gifts to the community — at this Time of Dire Beauty. That we may all be the balm!

Max Dashu is an American feminist historian, author, and artist who has focused her life’s work on uncovering women’s suppressed histories, which has meant delving into the gendered history of the witch hunts. Her areas of expertise include female iconography, mother-right cultures, and the origins of patriarchy. She’s the founder of the Suppressed Histories Archives, and the author of the book, Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, part of a multivolume series about women in European folk religion and the witch hunts.

Listen in on Caroline Casey’s completely pertinent romp with Trickster-Jungian James Hillman. In this rare interview upon the release of The Soul’s Code, the now great ancestor Hillman opens up about culture, magic, and the truth of our human destiny.

James Hillman created a new vision of psychology, one in which psychology becomes a “supreme discipline” concerned not only with the psyche of humanity but the “soul” which is at the heart of the world. Vilified by some, he has been called brilliant, explosive, and poetic by others. While some psychologists have applauded Hillman’s call for a return of the soul to a central place in psychology, others have been put off by the fact that Hillman’s own writings are critical of the humanist tradition, highly provocative, and occasionally abstruse.

Guests in this collection of green experts include herbalist Stephen Buhner, enviro-activist Derek Jensen, erudite Druid wizard John Michael Greer, renewable fuels genius David Blume, renewable energy on Indian reservations activist Bob Gough, Bill Benenson (producer-director of the film Soil), Michael Stocker (marine bio-acoustician on healing the oceans), the late investigative reporter Mike Ruppert, left wing social critic Henry Giroux (founder of Nutiva) and anti-GMO pro-sanity activist John Roulac.