We live in a culture that prizes productivity over wisdom, youth over age, surface over depth. The elder feminine—what Jungians call the Crone—has been banished from the modern psyche. She is feared, ridiculed, or rendered invisible. Yet in fairytales, myths, and dreams, she still knocks at the door, bearing flame, question, and initiation.

In this online seminar, we will explore how to court the Crone as a necessary antidote to the cultural syndrome of modernity: a syndrome marked by speed, severance, and spiritual forgetfulness. Drawing on Baba Yaga’s Wisdom: A Jungian Journey Through Dreams and Fairytales, we will enter the Crone’s forest and confront the psychic and symbolic tasks she sets before us.

Through Jungian analysis, storytelling, dreamwork, and reflective practice, we will learn to welcome her as an archetype of transformation, authority, and soulful discernment in our time.

To court the Crone is to welcome back the wisdom the world has forgotten. It is to sit by the fire of the old stories, to grind truth in the mortar of experience, and to carry a skull-lantern into the dark places of culture and soul. This seminar is a calling, a threshold, and a return.

Week 1: The Crone Cast Out

• How modernity banishes the Crone
• Symptoms of Crone loss: burnout, collapse, over-adaptation
• Fairytales of the discarded old woman
• Reflective prompts: locating the forgotten Crone within

Week 2: Entering the Forest

• Baba Yaga’s hut and the ritual of approach
• Initiatory fear and the sacred threat of wisdom
• Tasks of transformation (bones, bread, fire)
• Dream analysis and group sharing

COURTING THE CRONE

Reclaiming Wisdom in an Age of Disposability

LIVE WORKSHOP

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SATURDAY

Jan. 10, 17, 24, 31, 2026
2 hr session each day
1 1:00am ET - 1:00pm ET

Early registration discount ends x

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Week 3: Courting the Crone

• Listening to the voice of the Crone in dream and life
• Archetypal embodiment: reclaiming intuition, grief, solitude
• Case examples from analytic work and *Baba Yaga’s Wisdom*
• Symbolic writing or creative exercise

Week 4: Becoming the Lantern-Bearer

• Leaving the hut: the return with wisdom
• Crone blessings for the collective
• Storytelling circle: each participant offers a tale of becoming
• Closing ritual and communal benediction

with Jungian Analyst
Muriel McMahon

Muriel McMahon, M. Ed., is a Zurich-trained Jungian analyst

Words, nature, dreams and story are sacred texts. They inscribe and articulate the pattern and the meaning of our lives. As a literature teacher, writer, and a Jungian analyst for close to 40 years, Muriel McMahon’s professional experience is vast and varied.  Her personal passions include writer, iconographer, teacher, grandmother and steward of 100-acres of woods in Ontario, Canada. You can find samples of her writing @ Substack

recommended reading

Baba Yaga’s Wisdom: A Jungian Journey Through Dreams and Fairytales by Muriel McMahon

The Feminine In Fairytales: Marie-Louise von Franz

Individuation and the Archetypal Feminine: Carl Jung
Contemporary thinkers on aging, ecology, and wisdom (e.g., Sharon Blackie, Clarissa Pinkola Estés)