Bernadette Brady's Predictive Grids

[TheHangingDude]

Hello,

When I found out that PlanetDance has a built-in programming language, I knew I wanted to create something for it, so here's my humble attempt at making something useful.

In the first chapters of her book "Predictive Astrology: The Eagle and the Lark" Bernadette Brady offers a system to help with delineating a given transit. Since we all probably have some transits going on in our charts at all times, accounting for each of them by hand quickly turns into some hassle, especially for a beginner like myself. I don't know if anybody even needs this, but when I tried to apply her framework to people I know personally, I had some interesting positive results, so naturally, I decided to automate this.

In short, Brady suggests that for each significant transit you make a grid like this:

	-- Transit --	-- Natal --
Planet	Pluto	sq Mercury
Natal house	1	1
Transit house	4
Natal house(s) ruled by planet	1	8, 11

To delineate a transit by her method, you not only consider the aspect and planets involved, but also houses that they occupy, rule over or transit through. Brady says "top/middle/bottom row" referring to the rows with houses only. So to use her teminology,
- Top row of the grid means the houses (areas of life) that would be sources of event triggered by transit;
- The main action unfolds in the middle row, the natal house that a transiting planet is moving through;
- The bottom row describes the houses that will have the outcome of event(s) described in the rest of the grid.

How to use it: put the script into your %Planetdance%/ab folder, open a transit to some radix and launch the program. Press Escape key to close the program window.

For example, the output that this program would produce for Arnold Schwarzenegger, should he be so inclined to sit in Los Angeles, open PlanetDance and run this script for himself approximately at the time of this post:



What I've done here is I pivoted the grids. Instead of rows, the houses are in columns, for ease of readability. Snd means "sender", Rcv means "receiver", and "src/act/out" captions mean "source/action/outcome" respectively.

As we can see, at the moment Mr. Schwarzenegger has Neptune sextile his North Node within 1 degree, with events that would (sextile) create an opportunity in 4th House, and if taken on, would make some action in 10th house with results that he would see in his 9th and 11th houses and whatever matters that are governed by Venus within context of his chart. (And he also has a bunch of other transits not included in the screenshot.)

For specific interpretations I'm afraid I will have to refer you to the book itself because it's copyrighted material that cannot be freely quoted (but I've made an extended version with her interpretations for private use, that I could probably privately share with anybody interested strictly for education purposes if that's even a thing).

The script follows rules outlined by Brady, meaning that if an aspect is formed to an angle, the source house of the angle is not mentioned in the grid, and in the outcome is included the planet that rules over the sign that captures the angle (both traditional and modern rulers are included).

The script only includes aspects formed by Mars-Pluto (sorted down from Pluto) to personal planets and Saturn. Quintile-related aspects are not included because they are not mentioned in the book. Vertex is not included because, unlike Asc or Mc, it is not a "first-class" citizen of the AB framework, and I couldn't make it work immediately. But I'll try to cover it in the next versions someday.

The script doesn't enforce orbs so it's up to you to choose orbs before running the script. I've made a couple of 1-2-3 degrees presets myself for ease of use, and you can do the same easily in Options - Orbs - Bi-wheel of PlanetDance, just don't forget to include the minor aspects too. Brady recommends that only 1 degree orbs are used, or even smaller, but so far I've found that using wider orbs (2-3 degrees) for trans-Saturnians can also yield some results.

The script was done with whole sign houses in mind, because that's what Brady used throughout the book. The script doesn't account for house interceptions or any non-whole-sign issues that may arise from that.

Upcoming features: by Brady's recommendations, treat oppositions to nodes as conjunctions of opposing nodes; include South Node accordingly if an aspect is formed to North Node; and whatever else comes to mind in the future.

_{Edits: typos and some wording.}

[ABer]

Thanks Dude - nice looking code. Ed

[Jean]

Wow, i always love it when i see this, my compliments, looks great.
Some remarks.

I would add a menu(0, "Close", close) in stead of the keypress, it's more visible to the user.
Placing it in somewhere in ab/horoscope will make it accessible from the horoscope / right mouse click menu.

Vertex is a little complicated because it needs getplanet(), it can't user the shorter getplanetx() function because it needs houses, it's like this

Code: [Select]

real r[6];
copyhoroscope(-1, 0);
real vertex = getplanet(16, 0, r);

The array r will hold values like declination etc but if you only need the length you can use it this way. The trick with getplanet() (as opposed to getplanetx) is that it needs a fully calculated horoscope with houses else it can't return values for things like vertex.

[TheHangingDude]

Thanks Dude - nice looking code. Ed

Thank you Ed. I'll try to keep it up.

Wow, i always love it when i see this, my compliments, looks great.
Some remarks.

I would add a menu(0, "Close", close) in stead of the keypress, it's more visible to the user.
Placing it in somewhere in ab/horoscope will make it accessible from the horoscope / right mouse click menu.

Vertex is a little complicated because it needs getplanet(), it can't user the shorter getplanetx() function because it needs houses, it's like this

Code: [Select]

real r[6];
copyhoroscope(-1, 0);
real vertex = getplanet(16, 0, r);


Thank you Jean. I haven't looked into getplanet() yet but now I will.

In relation to that, can Vertex's planet index (16) be used in getaspects... related functions even if Vertex is not checked manually in global/horoscope extra objects?

[Jean]

You can't use getaspects() with things like vertex.
Originally ab was only 16 'planets', sun.. mc, later on i added what is called objects, all the rest. So that division is still notable everywhere, calculate() for instance only does those 16 (but it does houses).
So you have to use things like isaspect() / isangle() in a loop for those extra objects.

[TheHangingDude]

Thank you very much for the clarification, it shouldn't be a problem then. Also, does isaspect() use the orb thresholds defined in Options - Objects for objects when determining if there's an aspect or not?

[Jean]

isaspect uses the orbs defined in options - planets/aspects. Just like getaspects and getaspectsx.
isaspectx lets you set the orb yourself.
isangle lets you set everything yourself.

[Jean]

As for distribution, thanks for the free version. I've thought about adding it but it's just a bit too much one specific thing. So for now i think it's best just to let it be downloaded from the forum here. I'm thinking about adding a link in the Help to this particular board though, something like 'Download more scripts'.

ps, i wish you oekraine people the best of luck in these times and lets hope idiots like P (wont name the guy on my forum) will soon suffer and vanish.

[TheHangingDude]

You're welcome, and it'll always be for everybody to use. And you're right, Brady's method is something very specific that I don't see having a lot of popularity these days, if at all. I'll keep working on this little by little and post updates here. So far my backlog looks like: add Vertex, IC and South Node; add notes on applying/separating/sinister/dexter; notes on dates when a transit is "in/out orb", "in/out effect" (Brady suggests using very tight orbs for "in effect", like 12') and if the "sender" planet is  going to turn retrograde within transit; make s switch to textual representation of planets/aspects for more comfortable copy paste; and so on.

PS big thank you for your wishes and no less big thank you to your fellow citizens and government for helping us out! As banal as it sounds, we  really appreciate it.

[Jean]

Yes even though right wing bullshit is starting to pop up here lately like everywhere it seems.

Great to hear you are having fun with astrobasic!