Caroline Casey – Way of the Trickster

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 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.

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.

In our first Trickster shift, we:

• Convene our first Coyote Council of Cultural Influence.
• 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.
• Set up our altars of desirable mystery, on which we place our manifesto of dedicated devotion. (Trickster says, no rules, but guidelines. No homework, but home play.)
• Begin to create a resonant field of reciprocal blessing to support our dream projects, known and unknown.
• 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.

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 module, 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.

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 shift we’ll:

• Begin “insourcing” everything we’ve been outsourcing. We’ll begin to de-condition 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 is 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!

Venus says: “If all war is a failure of Imagination and Beauty — then all peace is a triumph of Imagination and Beauty.”

In this module, 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.

We gather to craft our storytelling skills and strategy, that our language, metaphor and story be in accord with our dedicated hearts.

In this module, 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.

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 childrens’ 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.

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!

In this final module, 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!