Free Software?

Would you believe that you can do all of your traditional astrology charting and calculations with a free software program?

When I discovered Morinus a few years ago it was quite a revelation.  This program does it all, and there’s also a Traditional version that’s tailored to the traditional astrologer.

The program’s most recent update as of this writing was on Oct. 2, 2011, and is version 3.5.

If you are absolutely new to astrology and just need to be able to pull up and print charts in a basic way, then I recommend using the free online chart calculation at Astro.com (Astrodienst) instead.  I’ll cover basic use of the Astrodienst charting in another post.

Install Traditional Morinus on Windows

1. Download your copy by following this link.  The download link (MorinusWin.zip) is at the bottom of that page.  Right click it, choose Save As, and save it somewhere you can find it.
2. After downloading, then open the zip folder and click “Extract all files”, choose a place you’ll remember and click “extract”.  That is where the program now resides on your computer.  It is installed.
3. Open that folder, find the file morinus.exe and right-click it, choosing “Create shortcut“.  Then cut and paste or drag and drop the shortcut onto your desktop.

Install the Swiss Ephemeris Files

In order to make sure that charts for earlier time periods are accurate, please install the swiss ephemeris files into Morinus by following the instructions below:

1. Download each of the 4 Ephem.zip files available at the bottom of the page linked to here (Ephem1.zip, Ephem2.zip etc.).
2. Open the Ephem1.zip file which you just downloaded. Click the menu option (should be near the top of the window) which says “extract all”.
3. Click browse and find the folder for your copy of Morinus. For Traditional Morinus the folder should be called “MorinusWin”. Open the folder “SWEP”, and then the folder “Ephem”.
4. Click “Select Folder”, then click “Extract”.
5. Repeat this step for the other 3 ephemeris zip files.

Draw Up a Chart in Traditional Morinus

1. With the program open, click Horoscope then New, or simply hold CTRL and press N, notated CTRL+N.
2. You will need the following information: Name, Date your charting (for instance birth date), Time (do this in 24 hour time, i.e. 1pm is 13 hours 0 minutes), Place of Birth, and two very tricky things, coordinates and time zone of your location, if you weren’t born in one of the major cities on their small list.  I recommend putting those last two in while adding your location to the list, by clicking on the “Place” button.
3. With the “Places” dialog box up, you first enter the longitude and latitude of the location.  You can go to this website, zoom out of the special Google map, zoom in on your location, and then click the relative location, and it will give you the longitude and latitude which you can enter here.  To enter the timezone, use this timezone map to find how many hours west (-) or east (+) of Greenwich time (GMT) your place is designated, for selecting the + or – and then putting the number where it says Hour under that.  Also, put the name of the location, and the altitude if known (not significant for most work), then click Add and your location is added to the Places database.  Once the location is there, then in the future just click Place and select it.
4. Finally, before you do a chart, make sure you know if the location had daylight saving in effect at that time of year.  You may need to do some investigation to find this out, and this link is a good place to start.  If it was in effect then make sure you check the “Daylight saving” box.
5. Once your chart is up, be sure to type CTRL+S to save the chart for later access.

Have fun!

I’ll explore some of the uses of Morinus in future articles in the Software category. Click here for an article on doing primary directions with Morinus.

When dealing with the more ancient varieties of traditional astrology, there is not as much need for software beyond chart calculation. An exception is primary directions where Morinus can be of considerable help.

Featured image is a reconstruction of the Antikythera mechanism modified from an image by Mogi [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY 2.5 ], from Wikimedia Commons