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the points that intersect the Ecliptic to give us the ascendant and
descendant of our natal charts, 15
Initially spurred on by the desire to better understand house systems,
Erlewine began working with sky maps. Laying out his natal horizon
system on an equatorial star map allowed him to identify the chart's
sensitive points (e.g., house cusps, ascendant, descendant, vertex etc., as
well as the planets) etched in the sky. As the result of what he called "a
grace", Erlewine came to see that the sky map was a reflection of the
History 5
map of the earth - or vice versa. He observed "that heaven and earth are
interchangeable, or in the last analysis one living entity - a single whole" .
Further natal investigations utilizing the Horizon co-ordinate system
with both the earth and sky perspectives led him to what he called the
Local Space chart, "where every object in the universe, celestial and
mundane, has an equal and valid position." 16 Erlewine's first steps in Local
Space (LS) were similar to Lewis' in as much as they both had to rely on
hand drawn maps. In an email to me, Erlewine writes, "I originally was
doing Local Space lines on a hand-held calculator. It could take me an
entire day to plot the basics of a LS map that can be now done in seconds.
I don't think folks have any idea of what it was like to have none of these
tools. [For example] I had to design and print my own heliocentric
ephemeris in order to study that." Here's a timeline of some of these
developments:
1975 - Michael Erlewine published The Sun Is Shining: Helio
Ephemeris 1653-2050. This is astrology's first ephemeris from a
Sun-centred perspective.
1977 - Astrophysical Directions was published. This book, coauthored by Michael and Margaret Erlewine, introduced astrologers
to the major co-ordinate systems used in astrology. It is a detailed
catalogue of deep space objects of all kinds, and it delineates the
methods for astrologers to plot their natal charts on sky maps. To
this day, it is the only work of its kind.
The First Astrology Programs for Personal Computers
In 1977, Michael Erlewine released the first astrology programs
for personal computers 17 (including one for LS). Thus, we can say
that in 1977 a new era in astrology had begun. Initially loaded
from cassette tapes (and later floppy disks), the programs performed
accurate calculations more quickly than possible by hand. In 1978
Erlewine founded Matrix Software to sell his programs. 18 A few
years later, in 1980, he was to publish The Manual of Computer
Programming for Astrologers. This innovative work provided the
routines necessary to calculate planetary positions. Some