Astrodynes
Astrodynes
(religion, spiritualism, and occult)Astrodynes is a technique for obtaining a numerical overview of a person’s birth chart. The technique summarizes how much power, harmony, and discord is associated with each planet, each house, and each sign in a chart. Elbert Benjamine of the Church of Light in Los Angeles adopted the terms “astrodynes,” “harmodynes,” and “discordynes” for the calculations of astrological energy that he and W. M. A. Drake developed in 1946. Benjamine tested, applied, and evaluated the material and conclusions sent in by Brotherhood of Light researchers around the world, according to his student Doris Chase Doane.
In 1950, Benjamine wrote in his Astrodyne Manual, “According to their relative power and harmony, the planets not only show the abilities and environment in which they can most successfully be used, but they also indicate the events and diseases of a particular type toward which there is a predisposition. Therefore it is very important to know as precisely as possible both the power of each planet in the birth-chart and its harmony or discord.” According to the astrodynes technique, the amount of power that a planet has is determined by the house that the planet resides in and by the aspects that the planet makes or receives. The orb for the aspects varies depending on which planets are involved, from which houses the aspects originate, and what aspect is being considered.
Due to such complicated considerations, calculating astrodynes by hand for one chart takes about ten hours. In the 1970s, Astro Numeric Service and Astro Communications Services began to offer computerized printouts of the astrodynes (also known as cosmodynes) tables and summaries. Then in the mid-1980s, Church of Light member John Molfese wrote a program for the IBM personal computer to calculate and print the astrodynes tables. To quickly provide accurate planet longitudes and declinations for his calculations, Molfese linked his program to John Halloran’s public domain program for calculating and saving charts. Users of Molfese’s program could display the names of all the charts saved with Halloran’s ASTROL96 and pick the charts for which the astrodynes program should print its tables. When Halloran released Astrology for Windows in 1994, Molfese followed suit and in 1995 released Astrodynes for Windows, which adds screen tables, bar graphs, pie charts, and other features to the astrodynes results. Halloran Software continues to distribute Astrodynes for Windows.
—John Halloran