I was born during eclipse season, two days after an unusual February full moon in Virgo (you can figure out the year). So in theory I should be on top of my eclipses, especially mutable ones like the one happening this weekend. According to my Git commits, I spent August's new moon releasing v1 of Ephem. I almost elected it for the exact lunar-solar conjunction, but that was past my bedtime and she ended up with a Taurus ascendant. This issue of Hackstrology is half astrology, half tech, and in true fashion, not cleanly either in either half.

sailorfe@hackstrology $ ephem cast 2025-09-07 18:08 "Pisces Lunar Eclipse"
Pisces Lunar Eclipse (Tropical)
2025-09-07 18:08 UTC
☉   15 Virgo 22 28
☽   15 Pisces 21 59
☿   10 Virgo 02 45
♀   15 Leo 41 47
♂   20 Libra 19 22
♃   19 Cancer 02 59
♄   29 Pisces 32 20 r
♅    1 Gemini 27 45 r
♆    1 Aries 11 15 r
♇    1 Aquarius 39 49 r
T☊  18 Pisces 20 03 r

a visit to the 11th house

This newsletter started with the conceit of being biweekly for each new an full moon, and I kicked off what I called a "full moon series" with my enormous Saturn/12th house issue with various citations and cultural touchstones I think about all the time, whereas Jupiter—yes, my chart ruler—and the 11th house are not as foregrounded in my mind. So in lieu of a proper "The Place of Jupiter" letter (we might get this for the Sagittarius new moon instead), I have some shorter ruminations on the 11th house I've had with friends in the disparate circles I move in. They didn't necessarily know we were discussing the 11th house, but I did.

Edit 2025-08-12: this project is now named Ephem and can be found on PyPI! Wait for a devlog installment on the Virgo new moon.

I wrote an entire post about getting my feet wet with pyswisseph, a Python extension to the Swiss Ephemeris C library, that I'm leaving up on my new devlog for archival purposes, milestone purposes. I look back on it and feel like I've aged because what's transpired in the mere work week since is the Python bootcamp I've lacked for the last half-year of halfassing learning this language. What I needed was a project and a dataset that I would actually use.

Basically, my complaints about Astrolog are very few but fairly large:

With the exception of software tutorials or config tours like this letter's first issue, I imagine new moons being quite short and sweet and just a bit technological, like this. This is my fingerwagging ♍☽ lecture on how to safeguard yourself this Mercury retrograde, a.k.a. in general, if you live as I do distrusting closed-source software and web-based applications. Bear in mind I also have clinical anxiety.

• Draft everything offline. Cut out the possibility of a premature "send" or "post." I don't care Gmail and WordPress have nice native editors. Take it to your notetaking application or document editor,even if they're cloud-based. If we're trying to be anti-fire, anti-Leo it means slowing down and adding extra steps as a safety net. You should only use destination editors for proofreading at most. This is how I use Buttondown: I write drafts in Neovim with its imperfect spellcheck, then edit in Buttondown's Markdown Mode, not Fancy Mode.
• Add an absurd number of reminders to your calendar events. I have one 24 hours in advance, 2 hours in advance, 1 hour in advance, and 30 minutes in advance on my "appointments" calendar.
• Enable two-factor-authentication. I have 2FA with Authy added to my Git host, all social media, and my banking and money transfer accounts. I'd say getting locked out of an account falls under the auspices of Mercury retrograde. (Don't ask me about hacks; I haven't done research into that astrologically.)

I said this two weeks ago, but Mercury stationed retrograde at 15 degrees of Leo, meaning at almost exactly halfway through its journey in that sign, so Mercury will retrace its steps until Aug. 11 when it reaches 4 degrees Leo. This means it has to transit Leo again, so even though it'll be direct in August, we won't feel any qualitative change from fixed fire until Mercury enters Virgo on... September 19.

Virgo is one of Mercury's two domiciles, the other being Gemini. It's the more careful, detail-oriented face of Mercury concerned with numbers and physical matters. Contrast that with Leo, a diva and a half with the charisma to match, taking for granted the care that goes into following its whims. Per my favorite "cookbook" by Kevin Burk, Mercury is peregrine for half of Leo and has dignity by term for the rest of it, from 6 to 13 and 22 to 29 degrees.¹ This means very little to most people, but what you have to know is Mercury could do worse in terms of fire signs (Sagittarius).

This letter's first full moon series will visit each of the visible planets through the houses where they have their joy. You can read Chris Brennan's 2013 ISAR article on this topic here, which forms the basis for a chunk of Hellenistic Astrology chapter 10.

Josefa de Óbidos, "St. Teresa of Avila, Mystic Spouse of Christ" (1672)

I've identified with my 12th house stellium in multiple house systems. Placidus places my Sun there, while whole signs claim my chart ruler Jupiter and punt my Sun to my 1st house. As an astrology novice, I was lured by Karen Hamaker-Zondag describing it as "the unconscious" and "a veiled house." In her book The Twelfth House, she paraphrases traditional meanings as "serious illnesses, of hospitals, sanatoria, asylums and even prisons" (emphasis mine) without citations because "they would have taken too much space,"¹ nevermind this translated text makes sparse use of footnotes to begin with.

Much like I'm a medievalist who feels closer to this tradition's forebears by hand-drawing birth charts, I interact with my computer through a Linux shell. Astrology through these means has been possible for longer than I've been alive thanks to Astrolog, a free and open-source astrology program continuously developed by Walter Pullen since 1991 for Windows, macOS, Unix, and once upon a time, MS-DOS and the Amiga! (80s and 90s computers, the earliest consumer PCs.) It's about as fully featured as SolarFire, but can be intimidating or unsexy to users who expect such 21st century excesses as anti-aliasing or cursors or more than 24 colors, and I promise you my ♇ is in ♐.

I thought I'd share my Astrolog 7.80 config in a git repository, which works for me on four Linux hosts: an Arch Linux laptop, a Debian 13 desktop, an Oracle VPS, and Termux. Nothing I'm saying here isn't clearly stated in the documentation or astrolog -H, but what follows are the steps I took to customize this program to largely medieval techniques.

Contents

1. What's a CLI?
2. Compiling
3. Configuration
4. Getting started
5. Why?
6. New Moon in Cancer