By Larry Barnett
In a tour d’force ninety-minute presentation hosted by Sonoma’s Praxis Peace Institute, radio personality Caroline Casey kept a packed audience in Andrew’s Hall at the Community Center enthralled with her observations and recommendations of how to cope with culture’s “dementors” and times of evil.
Using the focused lenses of astrology, history, mythology, language, semiotics, humor and insight, Casey, a master weaver of tales, emphasized the role of imagination and invoking the “trickster” to overcome obstacles and envision a better tomorrow. “Imagination becomes reality,” she advised, and pulled examples from indigenous cultures and contemporary events to make her case.
With a degree in semiotics, the study of signs, from Brown University, Casey is an accomplished astrologer with an almost polymath-like ability to compile correspondences and coincidences in history. Through this process, she has identified repeated patterns of behavior and responses to those patterns. When forces of decomposition happen, she observes, they are often followed by surges of creative re-composition, and improvements in social and environmental health.
Casey is the host-creator of the Visionary Activist Show on Pacifica Radio (KPFA in the Bay Area). She launched her first radio show in 1996 with noted Jungian analyst, James Hillman. She has offered mythological-astrological news analysis for ABC’s Nightline, CNN’s Crossfire, CBS’ Nightwatch, and others. Her Astrological Interpretation of World News and Politics have been sought in interviews in The Washington Post, and the London Sunday Times, among others. She is the author of “Making the Gods Work for You.”
Casey is no pessimist but sees our current situation clearly; she calls the perpetrators of evil what they are, “dementors” who in their madness go against the fabric of the life and health not just of people, but the entirety of earth’s living system of plants and animals, which she sees as our allies. She called upon the audience to both grieve and celebrate, to be active and insightful, to call upon the ancients for wisdom, to gather as a community, and yes, even to pray. She roused the audience by quoting Leticia James’ critique of many political figures – “Too pale, too male, too stale,” and playfully suggesting people make magic by joining the “Ouija Board of Directors.”
“Tyranny has always attacked Community, because tyranny is a cult – the toxic mimic of Community. So Let’s compost the “cult” out of culture,” she invoked. Using references to books like David Graeber’s “The Dawn of Everything,” Casey poked holes in our fictive national narrative and gave credit due to this continent’s indigenous people for the blessings of democracy.
“Let’s go backwards to the Liberating Source of Democratic Animism, set it free, offer ourselves as its agent. A gathering of Earth Citizens, aka Terra-ists …In times of great danger, Trickster comes alive, in us and in Nature. We gather to “consider” – “with the stars” – to avert greater “disaster” – “against the stars.” And what shall we toss into the Plutonic cauldron of collapse? And what shall we ladle out…and spiral forth into the memosphere? Let’s see it…Vision and Action.”
Praxis Peace Institute is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) organization that is dedicated to systemic peace, social and economic justice, environmental stewardship, and informed civic participation. Praxis has hosted six conferences in California and abroad that focus on these themes as well as offering frequent educational programs in Sonoma and online. Some of the speakers Praxis has hosted are Economist James Galbraith, Climate scientist Mark Z. Jacobson, Frances Moore Lappe, George Lakoff, Aviva Chomsky, Kim Stanley Robinson, Natasha Hakimi Zapata, Chesa Boudin, Anne Nelson, Sam Keen, Denis Hayes, and many more.
A signature program at Praxis has been the 13 week-long seminars at the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain, and 2026 will mark the 25th anniversary of Praxis Peace Institute.
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