Confessions of a Freaky Fortune Teller

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 doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to you – you can use it, too.

For those of you who aren’t astrologers, primary directions and direction by term are two of the most powerful predictive techniques in classical natal astrology. Up until now, it’s 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 doesn’t use PDs that’s fine, but it’s 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. It’s 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, that’s 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 it’s not, it’s 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 it’s an open-source language, it’s 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 you’re familiar with traditional astrology, you’ve 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 it’d 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. It’s 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, it’s good – but the only place I’ve 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.

We’re not going to get into the philosophies of choice of keys here today. If you’re familiar with primaries and terms, but a little fuzzy on the how-to-calculate side of things, just use the same keys I’m 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 native’s life. And those are very important to know when you’re delineating a natal chart. They’re also vital to the medieval Persian method of delineating solar returns, so if you happen to be working your way through Abu Ma’shar’s 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 I’m aware, there are not plans to reprint this one, so if you want it, get it now.

Back to Morinus.

I’ve spent several days trying to get this right, so I’ll 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.

I’m using the Dorothean system of dignities throughout here, though you can certainly use Ptolemaic if you like, or even modern. So let’s have a look. I can’t help you with installation problems (ask at the Morinus Page if this happens), but we’ll assume you’ve 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 you’re using, and add them to the place file in Morinus (don’t forget to hit ‘Save’ when you do!), but that’s quite straightforward.

After you’ve done that, you’ll 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, let’s set up Morinus to give us primary directions, and the change of terms of the planets and chart angles. I don’t believe it does terms alone, but you will see them in with the primaries, and once you know what you’re looking for, they’re easy to spot. I’m using the Naibod static key to calculate, and I’ll show you how to set that.

We’ve already got Morin’s chart loaded in this picture, so we’re looking at the Options menu at the top of the screen once again, and this time we’re going to click on Primary Keys:

I’ve 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 we’re 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 primary directions and direction by term, so I suggest you simply tick off what I’ve ticked off and hit Save. Now, once you’ve done that, go back to Options and hit Automatic save once again, or you’ll need to re-set them every time you open the programme.

With me so far? We have Morin’s chart loaded, we’ve tweaked it to look the way we want it to look, and we’ve set our primary direction and term instructions.

Now we’re 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 Morin’s life.

Now, because this is a little tricky, and because the terms are the thing we’re concentrating on, I’ve circled some (not all) of those, and I’ll tell you how to read them. Those things listed that aren’t 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 won’t fit here.

And here we are. Again, I’m sorry it’s so tiny. But let’s take a look, and once you download and instal Morinus, you’ll 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 Z’s, because we’re using only Zodiacal directions, not Mundane directions. The second column says Prom, short for Promissor. In the third column, you’re seeing D, for Direct. We’re not using converse progressions at all, so that makes sense. And in the fourth column we’re seeing Sig, for Significator.

So where are the term directions? Okay – look under Sig in that 4th column under the first circled entry, and you’re seeing MC, or Midheaven. If you look in the second column, you’re 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 it’s in, and the planet ruling the term it’s just gone into (per the scheme of Egyptian terms, as that’s 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 what’s 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 it’s moving into. Check the 4th column, the Significator, to see which point or planet it is that’s changing term.

If you understand the significance of term direction, you’re pretty much set. If not, we can discuss that another day, because this article is already quite lengthy. But hopefully, it’s 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 don’t usually get so technical, but Morinus is a wonderful programme, and given its lack of a Help file, I thought I’d write this for any of the other astrologers out there who might find it useful.

And once more for anybody who missed it – you can download Morinus here.

Cheers all -
Chanah