As of from November the first you will be able to purchase Astrofire from The Sophia Foundation of North America. Their web page is www.sophiafoundation.org and you can email them by clicking email

Their postal address and telephone number is:

Current users may the latest version of Astrofire.

Astrofire is an extensive makeover of Astro. It was going to be called Astro Version 2  but an intuition told me that it needed a new name and so Astrofire was born.

Much thanks is due to Wain Farrants who stuck through thick and thin testing the program and coming up with little and big ideas most of which I implemented giving the program enhanced features and many nifty new ways of doing things.

Now the following describes many of Astrofire's features the new ones being in purple.

ASTROFIRE has been developed as a production and research tool especially for those people interested in working with and developing Astrosophy.

The impulse to write this program came originally from seeing Willi Sucher in the seventies laboriously calculating from tables the positions of the planets which invariably took him half an hour or more. For more complex calculations, such as when applying the Hermetic Rule took him substantially longer.

It was specifically the Hermetic Rule which interested me as it introduced a dynamic into astrology that seemed to be missing. The rule is basically to determine the "Spiritual Conception" which is when the incarnating spirit takes up the task of developing the embryo which is about 10 lunar months before birth. The rule states simply that the Moon's position at birth becomes the Ascendant or Descendant at conception and that the Moon's position at conception becomes the Ascendant or Descendant at birth.

This prenatal time during which the embryo develops is also the time in which the basis for our future karma on Earth is rayed into us from the starry world by the Moon. The Moon thus, for the normal gestation period, completes about 10 orbits each orbit being equivalent to 7 years of life. Thus the movements of the prenatl planets relates directly to our individual lives.

To unveil to the imaginative eye that which is hidden in the movement of the planets before birth was my aim. Its implementation is my program. In addition it also contains many other features as detailed below

World Views

The normal world view is GEOCENTRIC but with ASTRO you can in addition select the HELIOCENTRIC, HERMETIC (as defined by Robert Powell) and a Lemnicentric in which the Sun and Earth each perform a lemniscate in the course of the year. All of the various charts can be displayed and printed in each of the world views. In addition there is a special chart which shows the planetary positions as seen from each of the traditional planets.

Planets

In addition to the 10 conventional planets you can now optionally select Chiron, The four main asteroids Vesta, Juno, Ceres and Pallas. Also included for the basic charts only are the newly discovered planets Sedna and Quaoar. You can also select up to 8 stars that can then be used in the same way as planets and also up to 12 fixed points. A fixed point is a longitude that you choose which could be, for example, the position of a particular planet at some bodies birth or death that you want to be included in your charts.

Zodiac

The stars are in the heavens and the constellations move with time, thus ASTROFIRE allows you to set up your own SIDEREAL ZODIAC, with equal or unequal constellations, as well as using the traditional TROPICAL and DRACONIC ZODIACS. The Zodiac can be displayed and printed both in the anticlockwise and clockwise directions.

The Stars

I had the intuition to give the stars a whole new significance in Astrofire. Thus I included a database of nearly 4500 stars which can be used in different ways. Rather than use all the stars you can, for many purposes, select only those stars you want. You can list those stars in conjunction with planets and also see those on the horizon and meridian. Naturally you can select the desired orbs. As mentioned above you can also select up to 8 stars to be used as planets.

Mega Stars

When we look up at the stars we see that some appear brighter than others and this we call their visual magnitude. Now a very faint star may in fact be much brighter than another which appears to be very bright, this is because the faint star is much further away than the bright star. The absolute magnitude measures the brightness of stars as if viewed from the same distance and the Mega Stars are the very brightest stars. Now Astrofire will work with both apparent and absolute magnitudes.

House Systems

The following nine house systems have been included: CAMPANUS, EQUAL, KOCH, MERIDIAN, MORINUS, PLACIDUS, PORPHYRY, REGIOMONTANUS and TOPOCENTRIC. Among the options to display the houses is that of displaying and printing them in the opposite direction to the Zodiac.

Epoch Calculation

The Epoch (conception) is calculated using the TRUTINE OF HERMES in two stages. Firstly, 4 possible epochs, using the criteria of Willi Sucher, are calculated using the entered birth date (both the length of the gestation period and the location for the Epoch can be entered if desired ).In the Second Step ASTRO searches for possible birth times when the Moon's position at Epoch is on the Ascendant or Descendant at birth and the Moon's position at birth is on the Ascendant or Descendant at the Epoch.

Aspects

You can define and save an unlimited number of sets of ASPECTS along with their orbs for use with the different charts.

Astrological Biography

This is the most revolutionary feature of ASTROFIRE and it is capable of searching for relationships (aspects, ingresses, eclipses, angular relationships) during the prenatal period and also between the prenatal period and lifetime. A number of time relationships are possible including one prenatal lunar month being equivalent to seven years and ten lunar months being equal to the time needed for the Zodiac to progress one degree (about 72 years). It is also possible to select the planets and whether the progression is from epoch or birth (both direction). There are in addition many other options.

Transits and Progressions

The program will also print transit and progressed (secondary, solar arc) charts and lists of events.

Charts

Most of the charts can be displayed and all of them printed out. The normal horoscope can be printed with or without houses, with the Zodiac in both possible direction and also the houses. An optional aspectogram in the chart centre can also be printed for selected aspects. Comparison charts, prenatal charts as well as the Astrological biography, Transits and Progressed charts can be all displayed and printed. When a non epoch chart is displayed, which is normally the case, a window appears on the right enabling you to change the event  (birth) time in both directions by varying amounts. This enables you to see immediately the effects of changing the birth time without going back and entering a new time - almost a horoscope video.

Star Charts

In Astro the format of the star charts was fixed by the program but in Astrofire I have provided many more options for their display.

Firstly you can see that Astrofire can make use of colours in the most amazing ways. You could have the background in white and the stars themselves in the colours you want for the each constellation. In the Zodiac, the width of which is now variable, the white line is the ecliptic and the black is the horizon. You will also notice that the planets appear as circles with the same colour as the planets glyph. There are many options for the display of the star zodiacs and I'm sure that you will like them.

Prenatal Charts

The various prenatal charts show the movement of the planets during the prenatal period. They can be circular as as below or rectangular.

COLOURS

As you can see from above you can now give the planets, constellations and many other objects their own unique colour, not only the fore ground but also the background colour. You can display the charts using one set of colours and print them with another. For printing it is more economical to use a white background however for displaying on the screen you can let artistic creative self go!

Similars

Similars was the one major feature of Willi Sucher's work that I reluctantly was unable to include in Astro but I am very pleased to have been able to include in Astrofire. Willi himself coined the word similar and this occurred when two charts had something similar between them. In his Heliocentric work he used this extensively when comparing the planetary positions in a birth chart with the planetary nodes and apsides of historical personalities. You can do this in Astrofire and much much more. Included with Astrofire is a database of over 1000 births and 1000 deaths courtesy of Robert Powell. You can search for similars against these databases  or against your own looking for planets in similar positions, with similar angles, with similar groupings of planets and much more.

ACS PC Atlas

You can now use the ACS PC Atlas instead of the one supplied for accurate positions of tens of thousands of towns along with accurate time corrections

Astrodatabank

You can also import Astrodatbank 2 database files. You could, for instance, export from Astrodatabank all the poets and writers born before 1930 into a file and import it into Astrofire.

Listings

You can list the events in one to five event tables ordered in many different ways - longitude, angular separation etc.

Planetary Motion

You can also display the movements of selected planets over any period of time

Here you see the eighth  year geocentric motion of Venus. Inspiring.....

Other Options

Well that's about it but as you may imagine there are just too many options to list in detail but you can use the Moon's node (and perigee), in the Heliocentric case the nodes and apsides can be displayed, create databases of clients, print a monthly ephemeris with or without aspects etc. etc.