Astrology: Morinus

Posted in Astrology, Reviews, how to, readings on 07/07/2009 01:57 am by Chanah

Primary directions and directing the angles and planets through terms. A phrase nearly guaranteed to strike terror into the hearts of classical astrology students. Mostly to memories of hit sine, cosine (or wait, is it?) tangent (or both of them?), on the calculator for each planet or angle, repeat 200 times or until insane. Or your eyes glazed over as soon as you saw the Primary Directions words. But if you made it this far, your life as an astrologer is about to get a whole lot easier. And you modern astrologers? Take a look at the Ascendant and term directions, and see if it doesnt make a whole lot of sense to you you can use it, too. For those of you who arent astrologers, primary directions and direction by term are two of the most powerful predictive techniques in classical natal astrology. Up until now, its taken literally hours and hours of work to even calculate them not counting the time you spend discovering what they mean in a particular chart. There are certainly other valid predictive techniques in classical astrology, so if your astrologer doesnt use PDs thats fine, but its nice to have the ability to do it without spending 40 or more hours on the maths alone. And now we do. And now you also know why in classical times, natal astrologers were usually employed by royalty or extremely wealthy families. Astrologers had to know a handful of charts, but believe me, they spent hundreds of hours both calculating and getting to know each one of those charts intimately. I want to tell you about a delightful piece of free software called Morinus. Its a bit tricky to instal, but the instructions on the download page are good, and if you need to put Python on your machine first, thats a fairly straightforward (and also free) installation. Python is simply a popular scripting language that Morinus is written in. It may already be on your computer, but if its not, its a lot like the Net Frame stuff that Windows update automagically installed for you during an update, but with Python you simply download and instal it yourself. Like any other programme, it takes only a few clicks, and since its an open-source language, its free. The Morinus page will tell you all about it. You can also download a Lengthy Paper from the Morinus page in PDF format giving an overview of primary directions. Of course, if youre familiar with traditional astrology, youve at least read about PDs somewhere and know how they can be used. But the calculations might have been beyond you (see above: hit sine, cosine, tangent, 200 times.). You also probably know how valuable itd be to direct the Ascendant and the other angles, and even the planets through terms for your natal delineations, were it not for reckoning Oblique Ascensions or does this point require Right Ascension?, working out how many minutes are left to the Ascendant, and wait do I add or subtract here? This is where Morinus comes in. Its wonderful for this stuff. But Morinus does not come with a help file. Still, the Freaky Fortune Teller is here to help you, because Rob from Morinus (software developer extraordinaire) and Steven Birchfield (traditional astrologer extraordinare), as well as Martin Gansten, who literally wrote the book on primary directions (pick this one up, its good but the only place Ive been able to find it is at Wessex see a sample chapter here) helped me out, and if I can set this up, so can you. I extend profuse gratitude to these fine gentlemen, and any errors you may find in these instructions are mine and mine alone not theirs. Were not going to get into the philosophies of choice of keys here today. If youre familiar with primaries and terms, but a little fuzzy on the how-to-calculate side of things, just use the same keys Im using. If you prefer other keys for whatever reason, use those. This post is about showing you how to set up and use Morinus to make these particular parts of chart calculation much, much simpler, regardless of your preferred method. The really neat thing about Morinus is that in addition to primaries, it will calculate the term changes of the ascendant, other angles, and planets for you throughout the years of the natives life. And those are very important to know when youre delineating a natal chart. Theyre also vital to the medieval Persian method of delineating solar returns, so if you happen to be working your way through Abu Mashars On Solar Revolutions, some of those techniques are suddenly within reach of following. As a public service aside, there are a few copies of On Solar Revolutions left at Project Hindsight for $25 each. As far as Im aware, there are not plans to reprint this one, so if you want it, get it now. Back to Morinus. Ive spent several days trying to get this right, so Ill give you the benefits of my trial and error here, and many thanks once again to Martin Gansten for helping me with the mysterious disappearing settings. Im using the Dorothean system of dignities throughout here, though you can certainly use Ptolemaic if you like, or even modern. So lets have a look. I cant help you with installation problems (ask at the Morinus Page if this happens), but well assume youve managed to get the programme onto your computer.

First, you need to load or add a horoscope you can see the menu to do that at the top left. The chart of Jean Baptiste Morin de Villefranche, after whom the programme was named, is pre-loaded, so you can work with his chart, or put in your own. You will need to look up the time zone, longitude and latitude of the places youre using, and add them to the place file in Morinus (dont forget to hit Save when you do!), but thats quite straightforward. After youve done that, youll see the chart. In the Options menu at the top of the page, it will let you adjust the dignities, house systems, aspects, orbs, which planets and chart points you want to show, etc. So do that, and then from the same Options menu, hit the Automatic save tab right near the bottom of Options to keep your settings. Now, lets set up Morinus to give us primary directions, and the change of terms of the planets and chart angles. I dont believe it does terms alone, but you will see them in with the primaries, and once you know what youre looking for, theyre easy to spot. Im using the Naibod static key to calculate, and Ill show you how to set that. Weve already got Morins chart loaded in this picture, so were looking at the Options menu at the top of the screen once again, and this time were going to click on Primary Keys:

Ive ticked Static as my choice, and selected Naibod for my key here:

With me so far? Click OK to save your choice. That brings us back to the chart screen, and this time were going to click on Options once again and go to the Primary Directions menu to set that up. These points are set for classical astrology. They will give you both some primary directions and perhaps more importantly direction by term. I suggest you simply tick off what Ive ticked off and hit Save. Now, once youve done that, go back to Options and hit Automatic save once again, or youll need to re-set them every time you open the programme. Of course you can play with other settings once you get the hang of it, but this is the one to get proper terms, and thats mostly what were concentrating on here today.

With me so far? We have Morins chart loaded, weve tweaked it to look the way we want it to look, and weve set our primary direction and term instructions. Now were going to look at Tables on the menu at the top of the main screen, and click on Primary Directions, which is at the very bottom of the list:

That brings up a little dialogue box asking if you want Direct, Converse, or both types of progressions. Choose Direct. It also lets you choose the period of life you want, in 25-year increments, so I chose to look at the first 25 years of Morins life. Now, because this is a little tricky, and because the terms are the thing were concentrating on, Ive circled some (not all) of those, and Ill tell you how to read them. Those things listed that arent terms are the primary directions, but those are easy-to-spot. I apologise that I had to shrink and cut off so much of the actual graphic, but the full view simply wont fit here.

And here we are. Again, Im sorry its so tiny. But lets take a look, and once you download and instal Morinus, youll be able to see it in full size. I assure you that the graphic is much larger and completely visible in its original form! The first column is straight Zs, because were using only Zodiacal directions, not Mundane directions. The second column says Prom, short for Promissor. In the third column, youre seeing D, for Direct. Were not using converse progressions at all, so that makes sense. And in the fourth column were seeing Sig, for Significator. So where are the term directions? Okay look under Sig in that 4th column under the first circled entry, and youre seeing MC, or Midheaven. If you look in the second column, youre seeing the glyphs for Capricorn and Venus. What this means is that the directed Midheaven is in Capricorn, and has just gone into the term of Venus the sixth column tells us this happened on 2 November 1583. The Midheaven, the significator in this event, has changed terms. Our Promissor column shows us the sign its in, and the planet ruling the term its just gone into (per the scheme of Egyptian terms, as thats what I set in my initial chart preferences). We can follow it down and see that on 21 May 1584, the Descendant was in Scorpio, and moved

into the term of Mars. Once more, the Significator, the point in the 4th column is whats changing. The Promissor, the information in the second column, shows the zodiacal sign and the planetary term the Significator is in. Now, there are also term changes of planets, and those work the same way. If we go down the graph a little bit, we can see the glyphs for Pisces and Mars in column 2 of another of our circled entries, and the glyph for the conjunction sign with the glyph for the Moon right next to it in column 4, on on 7 July 1584. That means the Moon has entered (conjuncted) the term of Mars in the sign of Pisces. In other words, anytime you see an astrological sign glyph together with a planet glyph in that second Promissor column, some point or planet in the chart is moving into a new term by direction, and the second column tells you which zodiacal sign and term its moving into. Check the 4th column, the Significator, to see which point or planet it is thats changing term. If you understand the significance of term direction, youre pretty much set. If not, we can discuss that another day, because this article is already quite lengthy. But hopefully, its shown you the technical part in a not-too-painful way. For the non-astrologers out there, I thank you for bearing with me through this one! I dont usually get so technical, but Morinus is a wonderful programme, and given its lack of a Help file, I thought Id write this for any of the other astrologers out there who might find it useful.