Sedona Astrology Club's annual Astrology Weekend event this year is a two day retreat featuring psychological astrologer Lynn Bell for an immersive, small sized workshop on mythology and the many faces of venus.
Lynn Bell
Lynn Bell has been a consulting astrologer for over four decades, looking deeply into the enfolding cosmos and the way it emerges in the lives of each person she works with. Lynn is particularly interested in the archetypal images that impact the soul and illuminate the psychological and spiritual growth of individuals.
For many years she was a tutor for the Centre for Psychological astrology in London, founded by Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas. Lynn is interested in many aspects of astrology, from mundane cycles to archetypes and mythology, the relation between soma and psyche, to reflection on the psychological implications of traditional astrology. Lynn’s work combines psychological and spiritual perspectives. She is passionate about working with hereditary patterns in families. After personal work in analysis, her training in Eriksonian Hypnosis led to work in family systems, and later, several years of ongoing research groups on the charts of families.
Schedule
Myths that Guide us through Grief and Loss workshop
8:00am Gather at Star Haven Ridge for daily opening
9:00am-11:30am Lecture with Lynn Bell
11:30pm-1:00pm Lunch Break (Lunch Included)
1:00pm-3:00pm Interactive group work with Lynn Bell
Dinner in Town & Stargazing
Myths that Guide us through Grief and Loss
When love, or home, or honour, is lost, great myths and stories give us a way through. Eros and Psyche is one of the myths that moves through many stages of disconnection and despair all in the quest to reunite with love. Other stories of separation, wandering and exile, from many of the great goddess traditions, remind us of the greater narratives in individual experience and the power of loss in our the lives, or in the experience of our ancestors. How do our own charts reflect these stories?
Sometimes we lose what we love because we cannot see others as they are. Who do we listen to? Where do we turn? Often this is the beginning of the soul’s journey. Psyche becomes contaminated by the negativity of others, and love flies away. She is determined to find it again, but often cannot discriminate between helpful and harmful advice. Her impossible tasks are often solved by outside help, but often in ways she barely understands. Her tale is one of awakening.
Sometimes we are part of an unbearable situation. An entrapment. Our closest relationships have frightening, claustrophobic, even dangerous elements. Dealing with the monster, even at the cost of personal betrayal, is a at the core of Ariadne’s story. She risks everything to break a destructive cycle. She chooses love above all. But the outcome is not what she imagines. She is asked to face the pain of loss and abandonment. And yet another path awaits her.
Sometimes outside fate intervenes, and we follow a dark path where what we have lost never returns. We are forever changed . The world changes with us. It goes into mourning and loses its brightness, its greenness. In a hidden place, the path of those we loved continues without us. Our fates are no longer entwined. The deep mourning of the mother, the sister, the beloved, for those who will not return is part of Demeter’s story.
Each of these losses changes the way we love. The way we truly know love.
Schedule
The Dark Side of Venus workshop
8:00am Gather at Star Haven Ridge for daily opening
9:00am-11:30am Lecture with Lynn Bell
11:30pm-1:00pm Lunch Break (Lunch Included)
1:00pm-3:00pm Interactive group work with Lynn Bell
Dinner in Town
7:00pm-8:00pm New Moon Ceremony
The Dark Side of Venus
Our experience of the feminine ranges from empathy to purifying rage, reflected by the exaltation of Venus in Pisces and its ‘detriment’ in Virgo, while Scorpio, in many minds, also holds a place of dark initiation. It would be more accurate to say that every planetary placement has a light and dark side, if we look deeply enough. In our culture, Venus has for too long been raised up in cotton candy images of the ingenue. While she can be delightful. she is much more than sweet. Venus, at her best ( or is it her worst?) can talk us into anything.
Which face of the goddess is revealed in our own charts? Does love have a lion heart, a penetrating sting, or a limitless empathy? Does she hold a weapon in her hand or touch us with a soft caress? The feminine, like the masculine, is not “one size fits all.” Beyond gender, beyond cultural expectation, a particular face of the human experience is expressed with Venus. Her particular magic can draw us in, can fascinate and seduce. She can drag us down or raise us up. The power of Venus, especially in a culture that is ambivalent about women, becomes evident when power is equated with the same look, the same hair, or type of lips. Is Venus then functioning as the planet of love and beauty or does she signify something else?
In many mythologies Venus had a peaceful side, but also came as a herald of war, reflections of the Evening and Morning Star positions. Explore her phase and expression in your own chart!
Registration
by Cassandra Cassiopeia
The great arms of the mother enfold us, reminding us that all we need is found in nature. Through trial and through loss, the truth is that all we need is to feel the solid earth below us: the mother who has held us when no one else could, who we will all return to. She gave us life and will take back our life when we are complete in this cycle. In the absence of mother, whether physical, literal, emotional or otherwise, we have our earthly mother who lovingly holds all of humanity: feeding us, teaching us, gently nudging us along our paths.
Ceres/Demeter is not the Earth mother Gaia herself, she is the mother Goddess who activates the cycle of seasons for Gaia to pass through. Demeter's many faces can be glimpsed in each season. Her winter knows grief, what it is to lose what one loves most. This grief is very much earthly, physical, based in duality where loss is real, final, and devastating. In her winter face, Demeter takes us with her down into the underworld, initiating us within the depths of the barren earth. Base minerals surround us, stripped back to the stone, in the absence of sunlight. Demeter teaches us in the dark, the lessons that can only be learned in the dark. Few would go to this place willingly, most are ripped away from their lives and quickly delivered into the land of Hades. But we are not alone, we have our blessed archetypal guides for this hellish place: Demeter and her sweetest only daughter, Persephone, Queen of the Underworld.
Persephone reminds us that when trapped in the underworld, we have the chance to rule it alongside Hades as an equal. Persephone, trapped in the underworld, lets her hunger be satiated by the consumption of the pomegranate seeds. This consumption connects her to the underworld eternally, allowing her to find her royal and honoured place within it. The underworld is full of bitter medicine. Through consuming it, the trap of this sad place becomes a holy throne. We are no longer held there, trapped, and ripped away. We are there by choice. These lands strangely become our home, and we are granted a dignity that we had never previously known. The maiden becomes a woman... our soft power is found. The victimization of our loss or pain becomes a holy wound transformed into clarity and sovereignty. Only what is real can remain in this place of raw material and truth. What is real is what is powerful. What is real and powerful, emerges in the spring as the materials of creation. The spring heralds the completion of the underworld journey, Demeter's emotional face changes Gaia's season once again.
Demeter is rich with insight and wisdom, and so she was worshiped for centuries. Her story is our story. One grain of her illumination is the illusion of separation. What was seemingly lost forever is returned, made holy and made whole. True love can never be taken. Through life and through death, love is immortal. It is our heartfelt connection to each other and to the divine that transcends physical reality. We are here to remember what is real and what is temporal. The dark cycles of life deliver us to that which is life sustaining. The darkness of the moon opens the portal of surrender and release, making space for vibrant life to fill our bones once more. Death feeds and sustains life. Let us celebrate that which was excruciating to let go of. Let us celebrate that which we have loved more than anyone could possibly understand. Let us celebrate the rich and fertile soil that has allowed us to fully live here now, in full decadence and delight of the earthly experience. In the midst of Spring, where Persephone's flowers and fruits return, let us feast in joyful reunion with our beloved.
"But when the earth shall bloom with the fragrant flowers of spring, then from the realm of darkness and gloom you shall come up once more."
- Hymn to Demeter
Merryman Cassels
Cassandra Cassiopeia
JiJi Corvo
JiJi is a seasoned tropical natal astrologer with over a decade of experience. Based in Sedona, AZ, she leads a practice rooted in connection and community. She has a deep passion for working with groups, specializing in facilitating group readings that center women and explore the stories carried through ancestral lineages. Her collaboration with Cassiopeia has been, in her words, “the partnership of the century.” Continuing her own practice while learning alongside her has been a dream realized. JiJi’s soul purpose is to remain a devoted student of the multiverse, continually reshaping its messages into forms that can come alive and be shared with those seeking their own sense of belonging within it.
JiJi is an AMAFA Certified Professional Astrologer
Kaitlyn Turner
Registration