There is a photograph I took in 2017, on the floor of a university library, of an open copy of Jonathan Black's The Secret History of the World. The page is the one where Black describes the planetary sequence: Saturn, the Sun, Venus, the Moon and Jupiter, weaving the conditions that made life on Earth possible. I remember taking it because I wanted to remember the exact page. I did not think anything further about what I would do with it.
Nine years later, I opened my laptop this morning to an analytics dashboard for a piece of software I have been building for two years. Forty-three thousand people visited the site last month. Most of them came in through articles in the grimoire, a knowledge base I have built out to roughly two thousand entries on planetary correspondences, crystals, herbs, spells, runes, tarot, and the relationships between them.
The library, and the dashboard. Twenty-one and twenty-nine. Six years apart. I have only recently been able to say, out loud, that these are the same project.
Why the MA did not end
Most MA research ends at graduation. You hand in the thesis, the external examiners sign off, the degree is conferred, and the research becomes a document you put in a drawer. That is not a failure mode; that is what most research is for. It proves you can do the work, and then you stop.
Mine did not stop, because the research had planted a question I could not answer with more reading. It was something like: if the Hermetic cosmology is internally coherent across two thousand years of texts, across Egyptian and Greek and Latin and Coptic translation, across Black and Mead and Everard and Freke and Gandy, and if it describes a specific mechanism by which consciousness enters a body through seven planetary spheres, then what would that mechanism look like rendered in software?
I did not have a coherent answer at 23. I did not even know I was asking the question. I knew I had painted invisible sentences onto the inside walls of a cube. I knew I thought the Wordsworth line was the most important sentence I had ever read. I knew something in the Corpus Hermeticum had landed with me and would not leave.
When I started building Lunary in May 2024, I was not thinking about the MA. I was thinking about a technical problem: existing astrology platforms were either dated, credulous, or marketed as entertainment, and I believed there was room for something that took the underlying system seriously. It was only about six months in, writing the knowledge schema for the grimoire, that I realised I was building the thesis I had written at 22. In code this time, and in Postgres tables, and in the way the birth chart calculator consumed a VSOP87 ephemeris and turned it into a set of quality assignments.
Same argument. Different medium.
What Lunary actually is, read through the MA lens
Here is what Lunary is, if you read it through the Hermetic frame I spent nine months in the library building.
The birth chart is the record of the qualities your consciousness acquired as it descended through the seven spheres. That is the reading Parts 4 and 5 of this series made explicit: the soul descends through Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, picking up a signature quality from each sphere, and the configuration at birth is the local snapshot of that descent. The chart is not a prediction. It is a receipt. Lunary's chart module calculates the positions using astronomy-engine, an open-source VSOP87 implementation in JavaScript, under an MIT licence. No subscription is needed to see the chart. It is the most honest object in the product.
The transit engine is the ongoing conversation between your acquired qualities and the spheres that gave them to you. When Mars moves across the position where the Moon sat at your birth, something that the ancient cosmology would call a conversation is happening between the sphere that contributed your instinct and reflex and the sphere that contributed your capacity for assertion. Whether or not you think that conversation is causal, the conversation is real in the sense that the mapping is real and the geometry is real and the tradition that assigned meaning to the geometry is two thousand years old and internally consistent. Lunary calculates all of this in real time. Thirty-six aspect types across every classical and modern body. The software does the arithmetic. The user does the reading.
The grimoire is the knowledge base. Two thousand articles, encoding the correspondences that have been maintained across cultures and centuries: which herb pairs with which planet, which crystal supports which intention, which tarot card corresponds to which path on the Tree of Life, which rune draws from which branch of Norse cosmology. The correspondences are not my invention. They are the things the tradition has kept stable for long enough that they became the tradition. All I have done is structure them so that a piece of software can retrieve them coherently. The grimoire is the MA bibliography, rewritten as a queryable graph.
The astral guide is the AI layer. I want to be precise about this, because it is the part most likely to be read uncharitably. The astral guide does not fabricate answers. It retrieves passages from the grimoire and the user's own chart context, and it stitches them into a reply. There is no generative astrology. There is no freewheeling fortune-telling. The model is constrained to surfacing what is already in the knowledge graph. You could, if you wanted, reach the same reply by clicking through ten articles yourself. The AI is there to save the clicks, not to invent the content.
Read in sequence, the four components are a single thing. The chart is the starting state. The transits are the live feed. The grimoire is the library. The astral guide is the librarian. The whole product is a UV light. It shows the reader what was already true about the sky at the moment they were born, and what is already true about the sky right now. The data was always there. The product is the decision about when the UV light comes up.
That sentence is the entire connection between the MA and Lunary. The MA was a cube with invisible quotes; you walked in and could not see them; the UV came on; the sentences appeared. Lunary is a dashboard with invisible relationships; you open it and cannot see them; the calculation runs; the relationships appear. Both are about making something visible that was already present.
I did not plan this. I am telling you, as honestly as I can, that I did not plan this, and that I realised it about eighteen months into building. The thesis had already written the product specification. I just took six years to read back through my own work and notice.
The distinction that keeps being missed
Astrology, as a cultural artefact, has two very different lives.
One is the horoscope column, the thing at the back of the magazine, the daily predictions on the apps that optimise for engagement. That life is loose, entertaining, and often dishonest. It makes claims it cannot justify. It markets certainty it does not have. It is the reason a lot of thoughtful people dismiss astrology before they ever encounter the source material. I do not defend this life. I understand why it is dismissed.
The other life is the cosmology the MA was engaging with. Older, more serious, harder to hold. It is the claim that the ancient world developed a specific framework for thinking about how consciousness enters a body, that the framework uses the planetary sequence as its organising principle, and that the natal chart is the application of this framework to a specific moment in time. This life does not claim that Venus causes you to like beautiful things. It claims that the sphere conventionally called Venus is associated with the quality conventionally called desire, and that your birth moment is a meaningful location within that framework.
Those are different projects. I am being honest about this because the distinction matters.
Lunary is built for the second project. The grimoire reads more like philosophical reference than like a lifestyle app. The transit articles walk through the astronomy first and the interpretation second. The astral guide refuses to predict. The industry, largely, markets the first project. I can only build what I think is defensible and see whether it finds an audience.
Information structured correctly becomes visible
The claim underneath everything I have ever built is straightforward, and it is the same claim the UV cube made: information that already exists in the world becomes visible when you structure it correctly and put the viewer inside the right affordance. The viewer does not need new information. The world does not need new events. The work is the architecture.
In the cube, that architecture was physical. Fabric panels, UV paint, a specific transition from darkness into invisible light. You walked in and the sentences appeared. In Lunary, the architecture is software. Schemas, an ephemeris, a knowledge graph, a retrieval layer. You open the app and the relationships appear. In both cases, the content was already there.
A product is an affordance for perception. A thesis is the same thing in prose. The MA was the argument in an academic register. Lunary is the argument in a commercial one. The argument has not changed; the medium and the reach have.
The personal close
I want to say this plainly, because the piece does not work without it.
The MA and Lunary are the same project.
They were started six years apart. They were submitted to completely different audiences. One lives in a university archive and in a stack of printed volumes on my parents' bookshelf. The other lives at a domain name and gets recalculated every minute. But the question underneath them is the same question, and the architecture underneath them is the same architecture, and the claim they are making is the same claim.
At 21, the claim had to be an installation, because I was an MA student with a timber frame and a bolt of fabric and a case of UV paint and a small grant. At 29, the claim has to be a product, because I am a founder with a codebase and a Stripe account and a team of one and a monthly server bill. The medium adapts to what is available. The argument does not.
If the MA taught me anything, it was that ideas survive their original container. The Corpus Hermeticum survived the collapse of the Alexandrian schools, the loss of the library, the burning of the Serapeum, the retranslation through Latin, the Renaissance rediscovery, the Victorian theosophists, the twentieth-century academic sceptics. The ideas did not need the original container. They needed readers who would build the next one.
Lunary is the next container I have been able to build. It is a sincere one. It is the one I know how to make. When I am dead, somebody else will build the container after it, and the ideas will keep going, because the ideas have kept going for two thousand years already and have not run out of structural integrity.
That is the whole series. That is what A Journey Through Light has been arguing, from the first piece to this one. The question is old. The answers are older. The work is making them visible again, in whatever medium the current century hands you to work with.
Thank you for reading this far. The fact that you did is, in its own small way, part of why the project continues.
This is part 7 of A Journey Through Light.