Astrology has been a hobby of mine for many years, and I’ve been secretly working on my own software to play with different calculations. I’m ready to start showing it to the world! I’ve named it “AstroScript” since it is really a scripting toolkit on top of the fantastic Swiss Ephemeris library. I’ve written it in my favorite programming language, Ruby, which was “designed for the programmer’s pleasure” 🤓
If you’re not familiar with the concept, harmonics in astrology are when you multiply the degrees of the planets by an integer and wrap around 360º. So e.g. in the 4th harmonic, squares become conjunctions. In the 3rd harmonic, trines become conjunctions. Much like a microscope opens up new insight into the world, harmonics open windows into prime number aspects that are not visible to the naked eye (like 5, 7, 11, 13, etc).
In the examples I’m showing below, I am using the 3rd and 4th harmonics to reveal astrological information similar to something like this grid, but in a different way.
Astrologers use this kind of grid to see the overall flavor of a chart. For instance, someone with dominant Cardinal Fire energy would on an overall level tend to have an Aries flavor.
(The elements of Fire/Earth/Air/Water, modalities of Cardinal/Fixed/Mutable, are discussed in an earlier post about deriving the zodiac from core harmonic principles.)
The 1st Harmonic
Below is the 1st harmonic (radix) chart I will be using as an example. Notice for example which planets are in the Fire signs (Mer/Ven/Mar in Aries, Jupiter in Leo, etc.)
The 3rd Harmonic - Elemental Sort
Now examine this 3rd harmonic chart below, and notice how the fire signs have moved into the “red zone” of the zodiac circle. I had this idea a few years ago when I noticed that the 3rd harmonic yields an “elemental sort,” where the four quadrants nicely map to the four elements.
In this new “dimension,” the traditional Zodiac loses some of it’s specific meaning. Notice that I’ve rearranged the labeling of the Zodiac order here – each of the three signs for each element are sort of like an elemental decanate, which reflects whether the planet is in the early/mid/late degrees of each element.
Rearranging the zodiac labels was inspired by something I read about Vedic divisional charts (vargas) which are harmonics – but in some vargas they do weird stuff like rearrange or mirror-flip certain zodiac sectors. (IIRC the definitive text on vargas is the cryptic Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra).
Next to the degree annotation, instead of a zodiac sign it shows modality, since that detail has been “lost in the shuffle” of harmonic mathematics.
This is sensitive to the natal Zodiac used (e.g. Tropical vs. Vedic/Sidereal)
Unlike the aspects of a harmonic chart which never change due to sidereal ayanamshas, the elements in this type of chart will be different if using a sidereal zodiac.
E.g. here’s the chart with Fagan-Bradley ayanamsha. Notice that the elements have changed because the Zodiac wheel is shifted.
The 4th Harmonic - Modality Sort
A similar concept can be done with the 4th harmonic, to sort for modality! Here, Cardinal/Fixed/Mutable are cyan/magenta/yellow colors on the zodiac wheel. Because the elemental information is now “lost in the shuffle,” I have displayed it with the elemental signs next to the degree numbers.
What does it mean?
In this post, I have illustrated the connection between harmonics and and used them to derive a new kind of astrology chart. Besides being an overly complicated way of sorting elements and modalities of the chart, what do the aspects within each chart actually mean?
In general, the 3rd harmonic and trines have to do with ease and flow, while the 4th harmonic and squares have to do with action and torque.
But at this stage it is still an early experiment, contemplating patterns in order to potentially decipher new insights! 🤓🙃