AstroPatterns - a scanner for astrological constellations

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Synopsis

AstroPatterns is a a tool for quickly finding astrological constellations through the time. It is particularly helpful in the search for resonances between two horoscopes. Such resonances are of interest in both branches of astrology: in individual as well as in mundane astrology.

Some typical use cases are:

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Introduction

In the middle ages, an astrologer was busy with lots of astronomical computations — tasks like casting charts, computing directions, profections, solar revolutions and much more — before he finally could apply his "core competence": the horoscope interpretation itself. If the French astrologer Alexandre Volguine is right, the ancient astrologers
"always started studying the epoch by means of directions and erected as many horoscopes as possible for the individual case at hand: Solar and lunar revolutions for ten years. Also, an individual horoscope had to be compared with mundane horoscopes - with the eclipses, syzygies and great conjunctions. All celestial phenomena of the times in question had to be scanned in relation with the individual nativity and the solar horoscopes..." [1]
With the advent of computers, life became easier for astrologers. Today, there is an abundance of computer programs, displaying a horoscope chart on a mouse click, together with all the relevant auxiliary horoscopes. On another mouse click, the astrologer is served with a complete list of transits or even directions (i.e. "progressions" for our native English astrologers), which would have kept him busy for hours in the mid of the last century.

But even with high quality astrological programs at hand, there would be still a lot of work involved if one would follow the outline of Alexandre Volguine: The horoscope computation being quick nowadays, I was missing a program with the ability to evaluate a large series of horoscopes, looking for some astrological constellation. This feature is important in many situations. To have it available now with AstroPatterns, opens the horizon of a more intense astrological research.

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The concept - Patterns meet Ranges

There are two central notions in AstroPatterns: Range and Pattern. The main action of AstroPatterns will be to check the presence of a Pattern in a given Range. A Range is basically a rule to produce a series of horoscopes. A Pattern is another kind of rule that can be evaluated on a horoscope, resulting in a score value (or in a simple boolean value: "true" meaning the Pattern holds for this horoscope, otherwise it results to "false"):
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The Range

A Range is any notion connected to a repetition in time. It can be thought of as a list of horoscopes or merely of dates, given either explicitly or by a certain algorithm. A Range can be iterated or listed. Some examples of Ranges are
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The Pattern

While the Range defines the set of horoscopes to be analyzed, the Pattern defines what we are looking for. The Pattern will then be applied to the Range, resulting in a hit list or in a subset for which the Pattern can be detected. There are four notions of Pattern, in increasing generality:
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An example

As a working example for the Excel UI of AstroPatterns, we will have a look at a claim of the German astrologer E. H. Troinski (who added the tertiary progressions to the instrumentarium of prognostical astrology). He claimed that the Pattern
Saturn in Ten, Mars in Twelve and Sun in One
in an Aries ingress or another relevant horoscope of mundane astrology with certainty is connected with dramatical political changes [2].

For the Sun's Aries ingress, there is no special Range. We can use the transit Range, however, specifying the Sun as Planet and the longitude 0° as parameter. Since Troinski's Pattern is a ConstellationPattern, we open the dialog "Run Settings" and fill it with these data: In the tab ConstellationPattern, we now directly enter Troinski's formula in a machine-readable format which nevertheless can be read and understood easily by astrologers: Going back to the Workplace tab, we fill out the missing parameters. We would be interested in all Vernal ingresses of Sun in the time span from 753 B.C. up to 1800 for Rome. We therefore enter the "start time" and "end time" accordingly. For the reference place, we use 12.5° East and 41.9° North as rough coordinates. Hitting "compute", gives the result after a few seconds: For the given time span, this is a complete list of the spring equinoxes of the Sun having Sun in I, Saturn in X and Mars in XII. It amazingly looks af if the genuine Roman time (including the empire of its follower, the Roman-catholic church) has been left out by Troinski's Pattern! The two years showing this constellation are of no particular importance in Roman history. It comes out that Troinski had miscomputed the house cusps for years like 44 B.C. (Cesar's assassination) which led Troinski to his hypothesis.

A further research would look at other Ranges, for example at syzygies instead of Vernal ingresses, or would try to change in some manner Troinski's definition of critical constellation. But please appreciate how quickly claims like that of Troinski can be verified (or falsified) using AstroPatterns.

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The interactive shell apc+

AstroPatterns is designed as a library which can be connected to an arbitrary User Interface. Besides the Excel worksheet, there is a REPL (read-evaluate-print loop) shell for AstroPatterns called apc+. Refer to the apc+ documentation for a detailed users' guide. For this introduction, it suffices to show you how the above task could have been done with the console program apc+.exe:

Observe that the times are different. As indicated by the labels, the output of the Excel worksheet is in Ephemeris Time (ET), whereas the lists of apc+ are displayed in Universal Time (UT). The difference is called Delta T. As you see, in ancient times this difference already amounts to several hours. Thus it is very important not to confuse UT with ET and always to keep track of the time scale in which you express your times.

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References

[1] quoted from A. Barbault, Astrologische Zukunftsdeutung - Transite, M&T Astrodata, Zürich 1987, translated into English by the author.
[2] E. H. Troinski, 1001 weltpolitische Horoskope, Baumgartner Verlag, Warpke/Billerbeck 1955, p. 27 pp.