Centre for Psychological Astrology Summer 2022 Courses

This from the Centre for Psychological Astrology in London. These are virtual so anyone can join:

The Summer 2022 webinars start on 8th May - take a look at the full details and book now at https://www.cpalondon.com/seminars.html

Webinars are real-time, online seminars in psychological astrology. You are able to interact with the tutor and other students as the session happens via a chat box. Experience a MISPA seminar live from anywhere in the world through your computer browser or app. If you can't make it live you can still book and receive four weeks access to the recording of the event afterwards.

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Lynn Bell
Lost and Found: Working with the 12th house in the birth chart
Sunday 8th May 2022 - 15.30-18.00 BST

Planets in the 12th house are often ‘cut off’ early in life,  they may feel invisible to us, neglected or unrecognized. They can also be misinterpreted by others, leading to a sense of separateness or exclusion. At the same time, they give access to other realms, and ways of being, even to memories out of time. As these  energies become consciously integrated they  have much to offer in terms of vision, compassion and insight. Unintegrated planets here can be the source of our “undoing”. How do we “find’ these energies and begin to live them well?

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John Green
Rage Hard: Reclaiming Mars Energy
Sunday 15th May 2022 - 15.30-18.00 BST

Will, drive, aggression, masculinity. These words often have negative connotations in our modern world. Mars is in crisis right now as we struggle with criminality, patriarchy and high rates of suicide. The warrior has been demoted to a safe fictional character or demonised in war, gang violence or as the sexual predator. Have we forgotten how to honour him?

In this re-evaluation of Mars, our driving force in life, we will look at why Mars is so important to every one of us and what terrible problems he can cause in life if we try and ignore him. How can we restore him to a noble figure?

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Shawn Nygaard
Angels & Daimons, Signs & Wonders
Sunday 29th May 2022 - 15.30-18.00 BST

“I sit and wait… does an Angel contemplate my Fate?” sings Robbie Williams in his song, “Angels.”

In our modern culture of billions and trillions of email messages, text messages, and instant messages transmitting back and forth across the world from smartphones, tablets, and personal computers, it’s easy to forget the original instant messengers: the angels (from the Greek word “angelos,” meaning: “messenger, one that announces”), known in ancient Greece as daimons. In our modern culture saturated with technology, social media, ultra-high definition, and everything we need seemingly within grasp or easily delivered, are angels and daimons even relevant? And what do they have to do with astrology?

Influenced by James Hillman’s “The Soul’s Code,” among other sources, this webinar explores angels, daimons, the Roman genius, and the North African genie – all variations on the same theme of the spirit that is born with us, within us, the spirit that remembers our soul’s reasons for being here on earth. How can we approach the natal chart with the daimon in mind? How might we experience transits if we imagine a daimon behind the scenes? We will look at chart examples for glimpses of the daimon within, and we’ll see how angels and daimons and genius and genies show up archetypally via the imagination of popular culture in movies, literature, and songs, and how they can enhance our astrological imagination, keeping us in close contact with soul.

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Darby Costello
The Sun and the Moon in the astrological chart
Sunday 19th June 2022 - 15.30-18.00 BST

The Sun and the Moon are the two great luminaries in our sky. The Sun keeps its shape and brightness and lights up our days, and the Moon waxes and wanes through the night sky in relation to the Sun. They are intimately related to each other in the heavens above us, and also in the astrological chart. Here we shall look at the relationship between them so to remember how fundamental they are to our natures and how we might honour them as we develop through our lives.

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Clare Martin
The Astrology of Grief
Sunday 26th June 2022 - 15.30-18.00 BST

This webinar will focus on the universal, and yet intensely personal, experience of grief. "Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love." (Rabbi Earl Grollman). We will explore the multi-layered astrological landscape of loss and grief and use the medium of enduring myths and stories to help us recognise and release the old griefs, personal, familial, ancestral and collective, which are stored in our bodies and souls.

[Freya’s Tears - Anne-Marie Zilberman in the style of Gustav Klimt]

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Jason Holley
Along the Edge of Self and Chaos: Venus, Mars, and the Birth of Eros
Sunday 3rd July 2022 - 15.30-18.00 BST

The Greeks said variously that Eros was the child of Nyx (Night) and Chaos who then created the entire world; and also the child of Venus and Mars whose arrows could inflame any heart with love. Audre Lorde wrote that “The erotic is the measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Something about Love creates and recreates the entire world. Yet Love also often unnerves and overwhelms us, taking our entire world apart.

In the astrological sky, Venus and Mars – planets belonging to the Night sect – tell part of the story of our relation to the erotic. Often repressed yet also objectified and used by a Day-centered world, when these planets come forward in us they frequently do so with intense need and a sense of urgency and possibility. In this webinar we will explore myths of these two archetypes drawn from the Greco-Roman tradition but also the earlier Egyptian and Mesopotamian stories, to understand each planet on its own terms, and how they subject us (Mars) and seduce us (Venus) away from the order of our Daytime selves into the rich, polymorphous, chaotic space of Night.

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See all the full details and book at: https://www.cpalondon.com/seminars.html

Previous webinars are available to view on demand here: https://www.mercuryinternetschool.com/video.html

Pardoning Witches in Scotland

According to the Smithsonian Magazine, Scotland is considering pardoning those who perished during the witch hunts in Scotland in the early years. It would be an effort to right a passed wrong.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Advocates are calling on leaders to exonerate the thousands of women and men targeted in witch hunts during the 16th through 18th centuries

Nora McGreevy

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Officials have moved one step closer to pardoning the nearly 4,000 people accused of witchcraft in Scotland between the 16th and 18th centuries, reports Paul English for the London Times.

Witch hunts swept across much of Europe between roughly 1450 and 1750. Fear of the devil, social unrest and mass hysteria contributed to the frenzy of accusations and trials, which often arose from local disputes and typically targeted unmarried or widowed women, per the National Galleries of Scotland.

Scotland in particular was a hotbed of supposed “witchcraft” during the early modern era, writes James Hookway for the Wall Street Journal. A 2003 University of Edinburgh report found that at least 3,837 people were accused of witchcraft in the country between 1563 and 1735—the years in which the Scottish Witchcraft Act was passed and repealed, respectively. Around 84 percent of those accused were women, and more than half were over the age of 40. Five large-scale witch hunts took place in Scotland between 1590 and 1662 alone—a much higher rate than in England, according to the British Library.

Speaking with the Times, lawyer Claire Mitchell, who leads Witches of Scotland alongside schoolteacher Zoe Venditozzi, notes that “[p]er capita, during the period between the 16th and 18th century, [Scotland] executed five times as many people as elsewhere in Europe, the vast majority of them women.”

One of Scotland’s first major witch hunts broke out in the coastal town of North Berwick in 1590. As Caroline Davies explains for the Guardian, James VI of Scotland believed that the town’s residents had used witchcraft to summon storms that delayed the ship carrying his Danish bride, Anne. Sixty or so people were accused over several months, including the servant Geillis Duncan.

In 1597, James himself wrote a treatise, Daemonologie, about demons and magic more broadly. He identified several signs of witchcraft, including the presence of a devil’s mark, interpreted loosely as any “marke upon some secreit place of their bodie.” The text amounted to a passionate defense for the punishment and persecution of witches, per the British Library.

James’ treatise became a bestseller. It even inspired playwright William Shakespeare to incorporate details from the North Berwick trials into his play Macbeth, which debuted shortly after the king was crowned James I of England and Ireland in 1603. Colloquially known as the “Scottish play,” Macbeth’s opening acts feature three witches who make prophecies, control the weather and incite powerful storms. As the Royal Shakespeare Company notes, the play was most likely performed for the first time in James’ court in August or December 1606.

The North Berwick trials took place almost a century before the infamous Salem Witch Trials broke out in colonial Massachusetts. The worst mass hysteria event in early American history, the trials resulted in some 150 accusations and 25 deaths.

Nora McGreevy can be reached through her website, noramcgreevy.com.

Norway's Demon Wall

Atlas Obscura reveals the existence of a strange wall in Norway called The Demon Wall. Read this to understand its history:

The demons are tiny, and legion. Scowling, tongue-flicking devils, no bigger than a thumbnail, and strange animals pile together in a tangle of dog legs and rabbit ears, each smaller than the next. The lines of the painting are so fine that the tiniest figures seem to pull the viewer into an infinite Satanic menagerie.

The story of how the demonveggen, or demon wall, came to be is as strange and disturbing as the mural itself. It’s a tale of scandal, fraud, and possible madness that begins with Gerhard Gotaas, one of Norway’s leading conservators of the mid-20th century. His work preserving and restoring medieval church art was wide-ranging and respected. But in 1940, when he entered a small village church in Sauherad to restore centuries-old artwork, he saw demons. Researchers determined earlier this year that, instead of reviving a 17th-century painting, Gotaas actually spent two years creating a monstrous mural from his own imagination. That revelation is just part of the story, however. Scant and contradictory clues only deepen the mystery of what might have possessed him to create the hellish image.

“We couldn’t believe it. We were shocked by how much he really did,” says Susanne Kaun, a conservator at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage (NIKU). Kaun undertook the demon wall investigation with her colleague, art historian Elisabeth Andersen. Through archival research and scientific analysis of the mural itself, the team discovered not only that Gotaas invented the demons, but also that he destroyed all remnants of the original art, painted more than 300 years earlier. “That’s really the most shocking thing, from a conservator point of view,” says Kaun. “He found something there that was old, and he painted over that. He changed what he found. He has to have known what he did.”

Wellness Practices - Muti

Muti

Native to Southern Africa, this alternative therapy gets its name from the Zulu word umuthi, meaning “tree.” Its purported uses vary from (failed) attempts at bringing luck to the South African team at the 2010 soccer World Cup to supposedly treating erectile dysfunction and sexually transmitted diseases. Animal parts and herbs are central to muti. Many South Africans are quietly dismissive of the practice, but they’ve heard enough stories of how it has helped save lives and even aided in prison escapes to know better than to forcefully dispute its powers.

This from OZY.

Nicolas Cage's Pyramid Tomb

Another fascinating article from Atlas Obscura -

Nicolas Cage has a history with the city of New Orleans, having purchased the infamously haunted LaLaurie Mansion, historic Our Lady of Perpetual Help Chapel, and now an unnamed tomb in the city’s beloved St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, home to the grave of another of New Orleans’ supernatural heavies, Marie Laveau. Is the pyramid a nod to the National Treasure movies? Or is it a tip-off to his alleged ties to the probably-fictitious secret Illuminati society? We may never know.