NORWAC – Post Conference Warp Up

At the last minute I decided to attend the the Northwest Astrological Conference (NORWAC). My decision to do this was entirely based on the fact that due to the coronavirus, the conference was placed online this year. Therefore, I didn’t have to use what little vacation time I have left to fly out to Seattle for the conference.

Of course attending a conference online is not idea, I prefer to meet people in person and socialize after hours. This would be my one minor compliant about the online conference. AFAN was able to provide a Zoom room for conference attendees and that was interesting experience in of itself.

While all the lectures I attended were good. I will only give the highlights on the lectures I found most memorable below.

My experience is broken down by day below:

Friday May 22, 2020

Unlike previous conferences I attended, the per-conference workshops were on Friday morning. I didn’t attend these as I working from home. Luckily for me working on the East Coast, the regular conference didn’t start until the end of the work day. I was able to get a full day’s of work in before attending.

Because I was celebrating Bitcoin Pizza Day, I missed one of the lectures. So my highlights on this day were Demtra George’s lecture on triplicity and terms, two rulership schemes which I rarely use. But that is mainly because I didn’t know how to use them properly. This will obviously change after this lecture.

How to become a Professional Astrologer was notable because of the in dept discussion on how to fire a bad client. I don’t have to many clients, but this is good information for any astrologer even if they are just starting out.

Finally, the AFAN Zoom room! This was the most interesting part. They were able to create breakout rooms so everyone could chat in smaller groups. This helped because there were over 900 attendees at the conference. Most lecture rooms have easily over 100 people. Being able to discuss in smaller groups of less than 10 was very nice.

Until the room was Zoom Bombed by hackers. Well, they were not exactly hackers, but the room address was published on Facebook and the rift-raft was able to attend and disrupt the room. The after hours event of course ended somewhat early because of this and the fact they needed to increase security.

Saturday May 23, 2020

One of my favorite lectures from Saturday, was Mark Jones’ explanation on how transits of the Lunar Nodes, Pluto, Neptune and Uranus triggered destined meetings between famous people in the examples he used. These are meetings that change the life of those natives involved. That is what is meant by destiny. Wouldn’t you want to know when a person comes into your life that completely changes it?

Then there was Laurence Hillman’s lecture, on Archetypes at Work. He has simple 10 minute he developed to help companies determine the dominant archetype of their employees because the archetypes of each of the major planets. This is a good thing to check if you are planning to build any type of organization. After all, who wants their organization to be filled with Mars type people? It probably wouldn’t function well, unless it is the military.

The AFAN Zoom room on this night better, but I did wished more people showed up. There were no Zoom bombers so the discussion in the main room and breakout rooms went on peacefully. The highlight of the evening was joining Rick Levine for an hour around 1 AM in morning East Coast time for a discussion on several different topics including current events.

Sunday May 24, 2020

For Sunday, the 2020 Panel was very enlightening about about the current events of the this year. The consensus is that this is major year in mundane astrology and that everything is about to shift. Additionally it seems that the coronavirus pandemic will not be over quite yet. Even if things are looking better now that summer has arrived.

I like Laura Nalbandian’s lecture on Ceres, a planet I use in my charts. She is using Ceres in the chart to see what nurtures the soul. There was also a discussion on the shadow side of Ceres, as in the mythology, Ceres is associated with winter and underworld. What I like that best was the unlike most lectures, a lively discussion developed between Laura and the attendees in the Zoom room.

Finally, I also thought that Bejamin Dykes’ lecture on the Lots was interesting. For the first time I actually understand on how to use the Lots in reading a Natal chart. While I don’t read Natal charts often it is a good tool to have in this technique available if I a run into a situation where I can’t see something by reading the normal sign, house planet configuration.

This was the last night for the AFAN Zoom room too. I have good discussion with those who should up about magic and how astrology might develop in the future. I may go into this in the future on this blog. The core issue is how does astrology work in space? Like on the Moon or Mars. How do you interpret Earth in the chart? How do you calculate an ascendant in the space between planets? These are questions we will have answer soon.

Monday May 25, 2020

I attended Austin Coppock’s lecture on Saturday on gemstones, which was fun and it gave some ideas on how to work with them magically. However, the highlight of the conference is probably his post-conference workshop on the Decans of the Zodiac. This was essentially an information overload workshop that went over the history and the interpretations of all the Decans. Frankly it was a lot of information to cover in 5 hours and I am surprised he managed to.

Some of the information he covered is in his book 36 Faces. Still reading the book didn’t help me in following along, because he went into more detail on the basic meaning of each Decan. The book does have more detail about the interpretation of the planets in each Decan, which was not specifically covered in this workshop.

I would highly recommend the book, if you can afford it. A friend told me after the lecture that she had looking for copy but couldn’t even find a used for less than $500. While talking I found one on Amazon for slightly less than $400. The good news is that during the lecture, a second edition of the book will printed and sold at much more reasonable price. So I would wait for the second edition if you don’t have a copy especially since the second edition will be better illustrated than the first.

One good thing NORWAC is doing is making the recordings of all lectures available for the next 2 weeks after the conference is over. Then in order to view them, you need to pay (at a steep discount for attendees!). I think this could be a good model for future astrological conferences to do. Since the lectures are available for the next 2 weeks I am going to spend a lot of time of watching every lecture I missed during the conference. Some of my favorites I will watch again too.