GLAC Day 1 – June 28, 2019

Updating this blog by day at a conference is hard! I spent too much time talking to everyone at the after party! Didn’t have time to update until this morning.

Yesterday was the first official day of the Great Lakes Astrology Conference. After the opening ceremony at 9 AM there are two lecture tracks one can choose from. Larger conferences have more tracks. SOTA which was slightly larger than GLAC had three, while UAC (United Astrology Conference) had 18. This is one of the things I like about the smaller conferences is that you can hear half or more of the speakers.

Typically you will also have friends going to the other lecture and letting you know if it is worth it to get the lecture on tape. Because sometimes it is hard to choose you want to hear from. Today there are 3 speakers from the Cleveland OH area, which is where I live. The speakers are Catherine Urban, Olga Stenina-Adognravi, and Julene Louis. I have heard all of them speak before at local events. For today’s lectures I am interested in the topics they picked to speak about too.

I also attended Gary Caton’s lecture. This is because I got a Golden Dawn Tarot deck a few years ago and I want to figure out how to use it. For the last lecture spot it was tough to choose between the two tracks since both topics interested me. I went to Samuel F. Rynolds’ lecture. Finally, the keynote speaker at the end of the day was Anne Ortelee.

The first speaker I went to today was Catherine Urban. Her lecture was on the Enraged Feminine and the Dark Goddess. The Dark Goddess archetype, gets a bad rap in modern times, but in ancient times, the Dark Goddess archetype was respected a legitimate aspect of the feminine experience. Her lecture discusses how the modern view on this subject is changing and the positive qualities of the Dark Goddess the ancients considered are coming back.

She talked about two different astrological points, Lilith and Eris. Lilith is the point that is the apogee of the Moon’s Orbit. She uses the true Lilith instead of the mean Lilith. The two points can vary by up to 30 degrees. The second point, is the dwarf plant Eris. Eris in Greek mythology is associated with discord and strife. For example, in myth she caused the Trojan War. Catherine relates both chart points to the Dark Goddess archetypes and showed several charts example that illustrate this well.

The second speaker I went to was Samuel F Reynolds. His lecture was on Astrology as Daemonic Geometry. He described this lecture on as experimental. This is because he is still working on this subject and experimenting on how best to use it. He related the ancient concept of a “Daemon” to astrology. In astrology there are between 6 and 10 methods to determine your personal daemon.

In the lecture Samuel doesn’t go over these methods, instead he relates the daemon to the entire natal chart, based on the houses and the different geometry between them according to the Thema Mundi. Specifically he talks about the 4^th, 8^th, and the 12^th house being key to understanding your daemon.

I also went to the lunch lecture today. Most conferences have lunch lectures where one can eat lunch while hearing a speaker. Lunch lectures are offered everyday of the conference, but today’s is the lecture I will be attending. This is because today’s lunch lecture is the on the Saturn-Pluto Conjunction and is a panel discussion with 3 different astrologers, Gemini Brett, Anne Ortelee, and Armand Diaz.

Anne talked about the how the past two Saturn Pluto conjunctions changed the world. Armand talked how the previous Saturn Neptune and Uranus Neptune conjunctions in Capricorn, prefigures the upcoming Saturn Pluto conjunction. Brett talked about how the conjunction is already in effect in the declination (parallel) and how it will affect the US, Great Britain, and Iran’s charts. There was also discussion on how the States versus the Federal (or EU) government will be a major issue during this time period.

The third speaker I went to is Gary Caton. His lecture was on the Minor Arcana of the Tarot & and the 36 Decans. He relates the decans to Deep Magic, because the decans were created in ancient Egypt. The ancient Egyptians associated the decans with specific rising stars and goods. In the essential diginity system, the decans give the power of images and magic to change fate.

He also goes through explaining how you can associate the decans where your personal planets are with tarot cards according to the Golden Dawn system. This can also be done with the conjunctions transpersonal planets to giving additional meaning to the epoch that planet represents.

Olga Stenina-Adognravi gave a short lecture on chart patterns. She relates the chart patterns created by Mark Edmond Jones with chart patterns developed 2000 years ago in Vedic astrology. She gave a longer version of the this presentation at LCAA a few months ago.

The final lecture I went to today was Julene Louis’s lecture on how to use the Vedic Vimshottari Dasas system to supplement the western reading. This system tells you which planets (the traditional planets and the nodes) are most import in transits. In order to calculation this, you need to your Moon’s position in the Sidereal Zodiac. This tells you which Dasa to start in.

Julene goes through several examples showing how to apply this system to a western chart reading. You can even do this using the Tropical Zodiac because the relative planet positions will be the same no matter what zodiac you use.

The last event of the day was the Keynote Address. This was given by Anne Ortlee. Here she talked about how the Gift of Challenging Times. We have a major Saturn Pluto Conjunction happening next year and then Pluto squares Eris for 5 times in the early 2020s. These challenges should be seen as a gift to the astrologer.

If you are interested in hearing more about any of the lectures I talked about I would suggest you go to the GLAC’s store to purchase the lectures when they become available.

I’ll try to get today’s events post at a reasonable today.

Edited 07/19/2019 – Spelling