Through a Glass Darkly

Ages ago (it’s been over a decade), in my research for a parody religion site I was creating, I stumbled onto Cauldron Farm and their Pagan Book of Hours. These people have created a pagan “monastic” lifestyle for themselves, complete with daily schedule and ritual. It’s great stuff, and if I had any money I’d buy their Breviary, just because I wanna read through it. But anyway . . .

Since they calculate their scheduled hours using the sunrise and sunset times, they had a page where you input the sunrise and sunset for your area and the hours are calculated for you. I oughta be ashamed to say it, but I stole their page — I wanted to do something similar for the astrological planetary hours, and I wanted to learn JavaScript, and I’ve found that the easiest way to learn a computer language is to take an existing working program, study it, and then modify it as your understanding of the language improves. This I did: I expanded their eight monastic hours and expanded it for the 12 planetary hours, added the 12 night hours, and figured out the rotation of the planet names so they’d be labelled correctly. Then I started playing.

See, about a decade before that I’d written a program in vBasic (Yes, I write in Basic. I’m still pissed that Microsoft messsed it up. Go ahead and laugh.) that I humbly called “The Divination SuperProgram,” that did all sorts of stuff: biorhythms and numerology, runes, tarot and a version of the I Ching, for starters. So I added a second text box to the planetary hours program, added information to what the top box figured, and buttons on the bottom for different divination stuff. I carried that program on my PDA, and still do today. And I thought this site would be the perfect place to share it. It’s terribly “old school,” but it gets the job done. Here’s what it’ll do:

You need to go to the input spaces under the first white box and type in your birthdate, and the sun rise/set times for your area. (You can get these from the Sun/Moon page.) Leave it as is to see a sample. Click “Daily Calculations” to see what pops up.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 12:20:28 PM — the date/time stamp from the computer.

This is day 70 of the year. — Day of the year calculated by the program. Happy to see it matches Wikipedia.

Universal: 3/11/11(m/d/y) Personal: 8/1/5 — Numerology calculations for that day, shown month/day/year, both Universal and personalized for the birthdate given.

Biorhythms: Physical: 6 (26% of cycle) Emotional: 23 (82% of cycle) Intellectual: 27 (81% of cycle) — biorhythms calculated for the birthdate given. Since at 25% the cycle is at its peak, at 50% it’s crossing the critical line, and at 75% it’s touching bottom, this was the best representation I could give without graphics.

Day Hours and Night Hours — The hour number, planetary ruler, and start time are given for each hour. How long the hours are is given at the bottom of each list. Watching this change throughout the year has given me a new way to visualize the difference between seasons. If you like to work with correspondences, you can pick the best time to do something.

You were born on a Monday You are 17187 days old today. — These two factoids appear at the very bottom of the window. They’re just fun things you can do with a birthdate.

After you do the daily calculations, you can go down to the second window and play with the divination buttons! Right now there are six:

Chinese Astrology – This will tell you the year in which you were born, a few qualities — good and bad — associated with this sign, and also what year it currently is in the Chinese Zodiac. WARNING: This is a very simple program, and does not take into account the lunar Chinese year; so if you were born in January or February, this information is PROBABLY WRONG. Sorry.

Runes – This button brings up the Rune of the Day, generated by dividing the day of the year it is by 24; it will go throu the runes 14 times a year that way. It also does a random 3-rune spread, labelled “Past, Action, Outcome.” That’s just how I use them; if there are better labels, please let me know! The rune name and its translation are given; the interpretations I leave up to you, though there may be a cheat sheet coming later.

Cleromancy – This is dice divination. The computer generates three random numbers between 1 and 6 (”3d6,” for us gamer geeks), and then show the meaning attached to the sum. The meanings are stolen from Scott Cunningham’s The Art of Divination.

Dominoes – Pretty much stolen from Ray Buckland’s Secrets of Gypsy Fortunetelling, this “pulls” three random dominoes out and gives you the meanings of each number. Double number dominoes are also explained.

AstroDice – taken from a dice set someone once showed me; a die for the planets, one for the signs, and a 12-sided die for the houses. It seemed like a neat way to get an instant picture of a situation, so I programmed it; then I forgot most of the astrology I knew. Interpret as you would an item in a chart.

Tarot – Like the Runes, this gives you the Card of the Day, and will go through the deck 4 1/2 times in the course of a year. It also gives you a random three-card spread, for you to interpret as you will.

So — there it is. My Little Daily Page. Please play with it! Tell me what you like and don’t like; let me know what I can add to it. I definitely need the coding practice! Let me know, too, what cheat sheets would be most helpful. I’ll do what I can.