Category: Enigma

Most astrology programs provide you with the possibility to configure the application to your liking. You can define values for orbs, select your favorite house system etc. You automatically apply such a configuration in your calculations and interpretations.
That is fine if you want to stick to the approach you are used to. If you are primarily doing consulting this probably is a good way to organize your work.
But this approach can become cumbersome if you want to do research and want to compare different techniques. Suppose you want to compare a variant of classical astrology with a variant that incorporates all newly found planets and also adds some asteroids. Both approaches are used often so such a comparison does make sense.
However, this requires you to redefine several different settings. These might be in the configuration or elsewhere in the program, but you do need to adjust them.
In the example above this could be the house system, e.g. Placidus for the modern variant and Whole Sign houses for the classical variant. The number of planets you want to take into account is very different. The orbs of the aspects will be different, in the classic version this might be whole sign orbs and in the modern version a pretty small orb because there are so many possibilities to form an aspect.
To facilitate comparisons, Enigma will support multiple configurations. You can define a configuration, give it a name, and save it. If you want a variant on an existing configuration, you can copy the existing one, change it, and save it under a different name.
It will always be possible to switch between configurations, even with an already calculated chart. So if you want to compare two techniques, you select one configuration and then another.
You can make as many configurations as you like but for simple changes, you are not forced to do so. Several items can be changed separately from the configuration, e.g. house system, ayanamsha, position (geocentric, topocentric, heliocentric).
The number of configurable items will grow during the development of Enigma. If a new release is installed that changes the possibilities of the configuration, all existing configurations will be updated automatically.

I started a new software project for astrological research. The package I will develop is called Enigma as I believe a big part of astrology is still covered in veils. I will describe some of the intended functionality in this blog and I will discuss functional issues on a Facebook group. For now just this short announcement. If you subscribe to the Facebook group you will receive messages if new information is published.