Registration Links:
Wednesdays, 9am-11:15am Pacific - October 14 - December 16
Fridays, 9am-11:15am Pacific - October 16 - December 18
US $585 / 9 Sessions / Max 14 students
Detailed Syllabus
For nine weeks, we will gather in a small online experiential seminar to enter the remarkable world of Greek tragedy. Together we will read a selection of plays by Aeschylus and Euripides, beginning with the Oresteia and culminating in The Bacchae. Along the way, we will explore one of the great transformations in the history of imagination: the movement from the sung world of epic into the public space of the theatre, where myth becomes something not only heard but witnessed, questioned, embodied, and shared.
The tragic stage is populated by many of the same gods, heroes, and families we have already encountered in Homer and Hesiod, yet something profound has changed. Characters begin to speak in their own voices. Women, strangers, servants, kings, and choruses all offer different understandings of the same events. The audience, too, becomes part of the drama—not simply receiving the myth but reflecting upon it. Questions of fate, freedom, justice, responsibility, desire, and the often bewildering presence of the gods are no longer merely narrated; they are enacted before a community and held open for contemplation.
For astrologers, these plays offer an especially rich meeting place. The theatre itself provides a powerful metaphor for the horoscope: many figures sharing a stage, each carrying their own perspective, each entering into dialogue, conflict, alliance, and transformation with the others. We will encounter the living imaginations of Apollo, Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, Dionysus, Zeus, Hecate, and many others, exploring their planetary, asteroid, and symbolic resonances in our own charts. The tragedies also invite us into some of astrology's oldest questions: the relationship between destiny and choice, between individual agency and larger patterns, between what belongs to us and what seems to move through us.
Our time together will be both contemplative and experiential. Between meetings, we will read the plays themselves, along with occasional supplemental readings drawn from classics, archetypal and Jungian psychology, philosophy, astrology, and contemporary re-imaginings of the myths. I will also share original essays and recorded conversations to provide historical, symbolic, and astrological context. In our meetings, we will engage the material through discussion, active imagination, dreamwork, writing, movement, ritual, art-making, and astrodrama, allowing the plays to become living encounters rather than objects of analysis.
One of the great gifts of tragedy is that it refuses simple answers. Again and again, it asks us to remain with multiple truths that cannot be easily reconciled. In doing so, it cultivates a symbolic imagination capable of holding tension without collapsing it into certainty. For those of us drawn to astrology, mythology, and divination, this is not only a literary education but a profound training in the art of perception itself: learning to hear many voices at once, to encounter the gods in their complexity, and to participate more deeply in the unfolding drama of our own lives.
Week 1
Introduction, Connection, and Orientation
Week 2
Agamemnon – Aeschylus
Week 3
Libation Bearers and The Eumenides – Aeschylus
Week 4
Hippolytus - Euripides
Week 5
Helen - Euripides
Week 6
Ion - Euripides
Week 7
Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris - Euripides
Week 8
The Bacchae - Euripides
Week 9
Integration
Registration Links:
Wednesdays, 9am-11:15am Pacific - October 14 - December 16
Fridays, 9am-11:15am Pacific - October 16 - December 18