Morinus

Meaning

Morinus houses follow the turning of the sky alone. The celestial equator, the circle along which the stars turn each day, is cut into twelve equal arcs of 30°, starting from the point where it crosses the meridian. Each mark is then carried straight onto the zodiac, and that point is a house cusp. The horizon plays no part, so neither the Ascendant nor the latitude of the birthplace changes the houses.

Precisely: the cusp of the 10th house is the ecliptic longitude of the point of the equator on the meridian. The 11th is that of the point 30° further east along the equator, the 12th 60°, and so on. Each point of the equator is brought onto the ecliptic along a great circle through the poles of the ecliptic, the way a star’s longitude is found. The cusps therefore depend only on the sidereal time of birth and on the tilt of the ecliptic.

Two things follow. First, the houses are nearly equal everywhere: each is between about 27½° and 32½° of the zodiac, at the equator as at 60° north, and the system works at every latitude. Second, the angles are not cusps. The 10th cusp lies a few degrees from the Midheaven, and the 1st cusp can lie far from the Ascendant, especially far from the equator. The Ascendant can then fall in the 12th house as easily as in the 1st, and is read as a point of its own.

Its strength is regularity: a house system that does not bend with latitude and does not crowd the zodiac into a few large houses. Its limit, for most astrologers, is the same fact seen from the other side. Houses that ignore the horizon break the link between the 1st house and what is rising in the east.

In practice

• A rare choice today, for astrologers who want houses that do not depend on the latitude of birth.
• The Ascendant read apart. With Morinus houses, the rising degree and its sign are read as a sensitive point, with their own aspects, rather than as the start of the 1st house.
• Births at high latitudes keep regular Morinus houses where quadrant systems become extreme.
• Interceptions occur at every latitude, because the equator and the zodiac do not line up: in a typical day, about one moment in four leaves a sign with no cusp.

Origin and history

The system bears the name of Jean-Baptiste Morin (1583–1656), a French mathematician, physician and astrologer who taught mathematics at the Collège Royal in Paris. His great work, Astrologia Gallica, a vast treatise in Latin, was published at The Hague in 1661, five years after his death. Morin is remembered above all for his method of reading charts through the houses, the rulers and the planets’ condition. The house system named after him has remained a minor option, kept by modern software among its standard choices.

How Ulune calculates it

Choose Morinus in the birth form’s options. The Swiss Ephemeris computes the cusps with its code M. The system works at every latitude, so Ulune never replaces it with Porphyry.

The Ascendant and the Midheaven are not cusps here: Ulune places them by the cusps like any other point, and the readings follow the house they fall in. A composite chart in Morinus cannot start from the Ascendant. Ulune anchors its ring on the midpoint of the two charts’ first cusps, and sets each other cusp at its average distance from the first cusp in the two charts.

Correspondences