empathy academy:
ritual magic for men and masculine folks who are lost in the patriarchy
"Empathy Academy is a space to speak and a space to listen. It is a dialogue in co-liberation around the confining stories and narratives of masculinity, and it offers alternatives to those paths."
– Roy
with olivia pepper and nick jaina
dates/time:
6 weeks
Tuesdays from 5-7pm
May 7th – June 11th
cost: $160
structure: emails go out on fridays (to honor venus and utilize weekend), lectures take place tuesdays (to honor and balance lord mars)
"I was seeking more awareness about magic and magical community. An invitation to learn more about magic and bring it into my day-to-day life. I've seen a lot of the feminine side of witchcraft, but I was more curious about what it meant to be a wizard."
– Anthony
class description:
empathy academy is a 6-week course taught by olivia pepper and nick jaina for men and masculine folks who are lost in the patriarchy. individuals who are raised male in this society have reached a crisis point as they come of age. they have found themselves with no tools for dealing with the swirl of emotions around them. they see their only acceptable avenues of expression as violence or a very narrow definition of masculine-defined sexuality.
men who are in this position see no discernable path towards growth. they see women who are able to connect with and reclaim positive feminine traits like community, sharing, magic, ritual, and self-care. men often don’t know how to access these things or wrongly assume that engagement with any of them will further diminish their masculine status, making them weak or effeminate. men react to this by further investing in many of the same areas of their life that have left them wanting, sticking only to the logical, proveable, material world.
another problem is that men have generally only thought that the only literature accessible to them is the canon of white male literature. it is important that men reach out of that bubble, specifically into the literature and teachings of women and people of color, to find ways of connecting with the dormant parts of themselves. it can seem like a daunting world of knowledge to enter into, but it can start as simply as engaging with familiar symbols and products of nature that have been around them their whole lives. engaging in a holistic world, a world of magic, a world of healing, nurturance and magic is greatly needed when men see before them only a path of destruction and violence.
As leonard shalin writes in the alphabet vs. the goddess, “goddess worship, feminine values, and women’s power depend on the ubiquity of the image. god worship, masculine values, and men’s domination of women are bound to the written word. word and image, like masculine and feminine, are complementary opposites. whenever a culture elevates the written word at the expense of the image, patriarchy dominates. when the importance of the image supersedes the written word, feminine values and egalitarianism flourish."
olivia pepper is a longtime teacher of tarot, ritual, and magic. she is teaming up for this important class with her apprentice nick jaina, an author and musician who teaches writing and creative expression. They offer this six week class as a way to show men that the world of magic and indeed accessing their own emotional landscape is much closer than they ever imagined. it is not a glowing spark, an instrumental swell. it is intuition and many things that are already contained in the self-healing wonder that is the human body.
"Empathy Academy is a loose collective of witches, wizards, and magic users, and men seeking community in a place where they can have a sanctuary, where they don't need to be afraid to be vulnerable. This group exists in the face of patriarchy, a history of dominating with force, violence, where conquering is seen as accomplishing. That system is like feeding a mad delusion, the culture that we've inherited, and we are trying to untangle that so we can breathe again. Just so we can be the natural wonders we were when we were kids. I see it as an invitation for the next generation, calling all aliens and robots, men who identified more with magic then their fellow humans, that there is a community for you on this planet."
– Anthony