Relationship Types
By Michael Erlewine
LOVER, LOVED ONE, INDEPENDENT, OR MULTI-RELATIONAL
[Here are some photos of how I wrote out charts before computers. I had thousands of them in chronological order stored in notebooks on shelves. Also, I include a photo of the “Heart Center Astrological Library as I had it in a 40’x40’ studio, with three floors to it. These astrology books are now part of the permanent collection of the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois, all catalogued and available for research. What follows will be a three-part series explaining how even someone with very little astrological training can handle relationships and it’s all graphic!]
Those are the four main kinds of relationships I have learned to chart astrologically, The Lover, The Loved One, The Independent, and the Multi-Relational. However, more or less, we tend to gravitate into one of these four types of relationships, whether it is family, marriage, friends, or what-have-you. Before we dive into those, a little background as to how I came upon these four types and, as mentioned, all of this is graphic.
We can’t be in two places at once. We are either on the outside looking in or on the inside looking out, or somewhere in between. Or really cutting to the chase, we are more loving than we are loveable or more loveable than we are loving, or again. somewhere in between. Either that, or we are independent and don’t really need a partner so much because we are self-absorbed and busy a lot. And finally, there are a few people who love and need experience so much that everyone they meet is an experience they need. These four charts are not hard to learn, so why was this no clear to me early on?
For a long time, I never could see what I am describing here because I was only looking at one chart, the traditional geocentric astrology chart that has been in use from (and before) the time of Copernicus (500 years ago) and is still, today, the most common chart modern astrologers use – the geocentric natal chart. And why is this and there is a “Why?”
This is because I stumbled across that my actual identity astrologically exists most clearly in the heliocentric natal chart, something Copernicus pointed out to us some 500 years ago, that everything does not revolve around the Earth, around ourselves. It’s not all about us. How could that be? We don’t live on the Sun. It’s a simple answer.
What did the first astronauts see when they finally got out in space? Obviously, they saw the Earth in its entirety, something that we collectively had never seen it. Because we live on it, much like looking at our own mind, we are too close to see it.
This appears to be a factor in heliocentric astrology because in heliocentric astronomy (and astrology), all the nine planets are bound to the Sun by gravity as they endlessly move forward orbiting the Sun. And, these same planets are not tied to Earth by gravity, which is what Copernicus pointed out. And the astronomer in the astrologers of that time, got the point and marched into the future with two natal charts in their hands, the traditional geocentric natal chart, but also the newly discovered heliocentric chart of their nativity.
Unfortunately, many astrologers back then did not accept what Copernicus pointed out 500 years ago any more than, as a group, they do today. By not factoring in the gravitational pull and bond a planet has to the Sun, and not to the Earth as astrologers cling to, whole-chart analysis of planetary patterns is not clear, but foggy.
Of course, I stumbled upon this because as a programmer trying way back then to program astrology on computers and make those programs available to my fellow astrologers, I had to first to program the heliocentric chart because that’s what astronomers do to get the traditional geocentric chart, first calculate the heliocentric coordinates and then simply transform those coordinates to geocentric by a coordinate transformation matrix. I did that.
And because that is how it is done by astronomers, I had no choice but to eventually actually look at my own heliocentric chart for the first time. I had never done that. And this was before home computers. I had to figure all this out by trig tables, calculations, and ephemerides.
This led to my first book, which I published in 1975, which was called “The Sun Is Shining,” which was a quite-accurate 400-year heliocentric ephemeris from 1653 to 2050, the first long range heliocentric ephemeris for astrologers or, for that matter, astronomers.
It was a small book that I had printed on 8.5 x 11 inches paper and folded in half and stapled by myself at home. It allowed anyone with a pocket calculator to calculate an accurate heliocentric natal chart in minutes. Here I was in a tiny office in Ann Arbor, Michigan answering questions I had in my mind and changing the course of astrology at the same time.
I created this in the early 1970s and published it in 1975. I went on to program astrology on pocket calculators, and then various programmable calculators, and by 1977 I had a full astrological program on a home computer in 8K of RAM, including geocentric, heliocentric, R.A./Declination, and Local Space (azimuth and altitude). By 1978, I had astrology programs running on the Commodore PET, Apple II, and eventually IBM PC, Osborne I, and others.
In 1978, I incorporated Matrix Software, and an article on me written for Red Herring Magazine determined that the only software company that was still on the Internet older than my own was a little company called Microsoft. In fact, even amateur astronomers had not made programs at that point, and so they bought mine, and ignored the astrology parts of it.
Remember, there were no hard drives, printers, or word processing programs back then. I had to adapt a 70 pound teletype machine to use as a printer, program my own word-processing justification, and record my programs to cassette tape, which then had to be verified, each and every recording.
That’s a bit of physical history of computers and astrological software, yet what came out of all that as far as astrology was not simply that astrology was programmed. I know, astrologers love to be liberated from log tables and ephemerides, but there is more to what was happening back then than that.
More important to me, and why I programmed astrology in the first place was in order to answer questions I had in my head about astrology. Math was my worst subject and I never even graduated from high school. I was driven by the questions in my head I wanted answers to.
[Next blogs will get into the types of relationships and partners.]
EMAIL Michael@Erlewine.net Note: If you would like to have access to other free books, articles, and videos on these topics, here are the links: SpiritGrooves.net.
For the next month, I am doing a few Zoom astrology readings. If interested, please email me with the subject “READINGS.”
As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.