Jim's scoring method for solunars

[Ember Nyx]

Hi Jim, in another thread, you posted these thoughts on your scoring method:

I have a spreadsheet with formulae I've evolved over time. I tried using the angularity strength of every planet and discovered that it was a mistake to give any planet that wasn't at least distantly foreground. I've moved to a point system: Every planet (natal and transiting) gets points on the following scale for its angularity:

Class 3 - 1 pt (7°-10° from a major angle, 2-3° from a minor angle)
Class 2 - 3 pt (3°-7° from a major angle, 1-2° from a minor angle)
Class 1 - 5 pt (1°-3° from a major angle, 0°30'-1° from a minor angle)
Partile - 6 pt (0°11'-1°00' from a major angle, 0°05'-0°30' from a minor angle)
Super-partile - 7 pt (0°-0°10' from a major angle, 0°-0°05' from a minor angle)


Benefic: Both Venuses and Jupiters + half of both Uranuses
Malefic: Both Marses and Saturns + half of both Neptunes
Change: Both Uranuses and both Plutos
Spotlight: Both Suns and both Moons
Dignity: Both Suns and both Jupiters
Indignity: Both Saturns and both Neptunes

I've been experimenting with a few more that haven't quite worked out satisfyingly - either the formula are invalid or need serious work. To let you know what I've been playing with:

Vulnerability-Sensitivity: Moons & Neptunes
Shifting Conditions (in contrast to Change): Moons and Uranuses
Sex: 2/3 of Moons, Venuses, & Marses
Security Needs: 2/3 of Moons, Saturns, & Neptunes
Commerce: 2/3 of Mercuries, Jupiters, & Saturns
Personal Loss: 2/3 of Venuses, Saturns, & Plutos

I know that more recently you have been layering in the SSR scores - is that to all fields, or just benefic/malefic?

Are there any other newer developments that I missed? I recently went through and scored all of my lunar returns for the year so this is fresh on my mind.

Side note... What do you think of scoring via Time Matters strength percentages? It doesn't line up exactly with your original system (since there's no way to distinguish between 6 and 7), but it feels like there must be a way to make that work...
I threw this together as a quick and dirty conversion system:

100% = 7 (probably overweights most of the time)
99% = 6
98% = 5
90%+ = 3
90%- = 1

[Jim Eshelman]

I know that more recently you have been layering in the SSR scores - is that to all fields, or just benefic/malefic?

I've been doing a full workup for the SSR and adding them. I'm not sure they literally add, but that's one (perhaps crude) way to place the lunar within the context of the year-chart.

Last year, when I was concentrating on "does the demi-lunar operate fully in the context of the SLR?" I did the same nesting/combining the SLR and DSLR scores. That wasn't fruitful. It's clear that the SLR and DSLR operate independently, even if life circumstances sometimes blur them. (They each have an independent voice.)

But add current SLR or DSLR to SSR scores seems at least approximately right for reflecting how the lunars ride the tides of the solar.

Are there any other newer developments that I missed?

No.

Side note... What do you think of scoring via Time Matters strength percentages? It doesn't line up exactly with your original system (since there's no way to distinguish between 6 and 7), but it feels like there must be a way to make that work...

I tried that. It gave screwy results. I think the main characteristic was that non-foreground planets effectively "don't exist" in the chart - they shouldn't have low scores, they should have NO scores. So I tried just using the scores of foreground planets, and they were too scrunched, not a clear spread.

In theory, some gradient like that should be the real measurement. But, when I didn't find one, the "block" approach gave a working answer. Also, it is a steeper climb - notice each "ground" steps up 2 points, not 1.

Oh, possibly a refinement (I don't know if I mentioned it): If an orb is near the outskirts of it's "ground," I drop a point. No hard rules, and I let myself vary it according to what other planets are doing. Most often I drop from 5 to 4 when Class 1 passes 2°45', drop from 3 to 2 when Class 2 drops past 6°. It doesn't make a big difference, but it makes more sense to me.

I threw this together as a quick and dirty conversion system:

100% = 7 (probably overweights most of the time)
99% = 6
98% = 5
90%+ = 3
90%- = 1

Oh, I thought you meant using the score numbers (percentages) themselves. (That's what my answer was about.)

Something like this probably will be good in the long run. I haven't gotten completely comfortable that our strength scales are exactly right, but I think they're pretty damn close to being right. I think the 7 is hard to get this way, because that 10' threshold (or just under it) really marks the difference in practice and you don't drop below 100% until after 40'. Excluding the 7 factor, it would roughly match what I'm doing to use 6 at 99% (out to 1°07'), 5 to 90% (out to 2°57'), 3 out to 45% (about 7°). But that's just another way of calculating the Class thresholds, rather than let the user select the boundaries.

[Ember Nyx]

I recently did some large-scale upcoming lunar return evaluation for myself and several friends (looking for charts where the Saturn-Neptune conjunction falls on angles), and I scored their benefics and malefics in your standard method. I have 4 blocks of 9+ months (several people's 2025s starting now, and my entire 2026). (I didn't do my 2025 since my first pass used the angularity % to score it, as I was spitballing before, so I don't want to use those non-standard scores for this.)

I suspect you probably already have some numbers like these, but you might be interested to know:

Benefic averages: 4.43, 4.59, 4.74, 5.95 = 4.93 overall average
Malefic averages: 3.5, 3.77, 4.04, 5.75 = 4.29 overall average
Their average together is 4.61, i.e. the average score for either benefic or malefic in any randomly-selected chart.

Highest benefic score: 9, 10, 14, 14 = 11.75
Highest malefic score: 8.5, 10.5, 12.5, 18 (yikes) = 12.38

For what it's worth, my 2026 (with a few months' extra data compared to the rest) had very average scores; it was not among the outliers in any category.

This isn't a lot of data in the grand scheme of things, and various years will probably have weird statistical properties since the malefics all move more slowly than their benefic counterparts do, but I am going to keep the number 4.5 in my head as a baseline, and 11-12ish as a threshold for "outstanding," and see how it may relate to the way these things play out.

[Jim Eshelman]

Interesting numbers and, as you say, good to keep in one's head. I hadn't averaged these because I was more interested, in any given case, with how the numbers played against each other - for example, in my current SLR, malefic-to-benefic would have been 14 to 0 at home (heavy malefic-leaning gap) with indignity to dignity 2 to 1 (no significant difference); and benefic-to-malefic 10 to 0 in Boston (heavy benefic-leaning gap) with dignity to indignity 8 to 0 (heavily weighted toward dignity).

My fantasy has been a phone app with four colored bars (or more, if we can develop other vectors sufficiently). Instead of looking an SLR, one could choose (as with some synastry apps that are very popular) just to show main vectors. For example, using your current SLR (and remembering that the extra scales I've thrown in probably aren't good, but it's a crude mockup), a screen that showed something like this for the current specified period:

Scales.png

[Ember Nyx]

First of all, the colored bars are awesome. Way down the line, when Time Matters or a successor is a full web app, this is exactly the kind of data visualization I'd love to add. (I've slowly been mocking up proposed UX redesign stuff, and I was screwing around with a customization page for these scores. It would be somewhat complex on web, but really complex on desktop.)

In addition to that sudden urge to get averages, I've been specifically subtracting the malefic score from the benefic score to get a single number. I don't water down the entire chart to that one number, but I'm curious about it; it sounds similar to the way you're thinking about it.

My logic was - the absolute value of both malefic and benefic scores (and maybe the others; I dunno) matters, which is why I list them, but the gap you mention is also important. When I tabulated my friends' lunars, I put extra emphasis on that gap score as an extreme simplification (and then gave a sentence or two of actual interpretation).

For example, here are my next few (with some amount of hand-waving near class boundaries):

SLR Feb 16 -
Benefic 7.5
Malefic 10.5
(-3)
There's a decent amount of pleasant and a pretty significant amount of unpleasant factors, which average out to "mixed but more unpleasant." In my experience so far, this has been accurate. It's a mixed-favoring-unpleasant month, but both the happy and unhappy moments are more pronounced than "average."

Demi-SLR Mar 2 -
Benefic 7
Malefic 0
(+7)
Clearly all benefic factors. My hypothesis about this being above the 4.5ish threshold isn't so much that it's entirely pleasant and not at all unpleasant, but that even the pleasantness is noticeably higher than "average."

SLR Mar 15 -
Benefic 9
Malefic 1.5
(+7.5)
Similar score-interpretation as the previous chart, but with both more good and more bad.

Etc. Is this something you do also? I might've seen you do it and then thought it was my idea; I don't remember

My fantasy has been a phone app with four colored bars (or more, if we can develop other vectors sufficiently).

I'm screwing around with Busy = Mercuries, Marses, half Suns. I know there's an argument for things like Saturns, maybe Moons, etc, but just to start someplace...

[Jim Eshelman]

In addition to that sudden urge to get averages, I've been specifically subtracting the malefic score from the benefic score to get a single number. I don't water down the entire chart to that one number, but I'm curious about it; it sounds similar to the way you're thinking about it.

Kind of, yes. But the magnitude of the scores also seems important. A +/- 5 when the numbers are small can feel a bit significant (say, ben 10, mal 5) but with large numbers irrelevant (B 25, M 20). For a single number, I might rather take their ratio (one is three times the size of the other, or whatever). This, though, loses the ability to scale against non-polarity items (e.g., Spotlight 18).

For example, here are my next few (with some amount of hand-waving near class boundaries):

SLR Feb 16 -
Benefic 7.5
Malefic 10.5
(-3)

Or by ratio, -1.4, not quite one and a half times the value of the other. Looking at the raw numbers, I'd call this "mixed, leaning malefic," the "mixed" part being as important - something's going to hurt but that somewhat high 7.5 also means that something good is coming out of it all (there is nontrivial benefic of a similar-but-lesser amount, as you caught).

There's a decent amount of pleasant and a pretty significant amount of unpleasant factors, which average out to "mixed but more unpleasant." In my experience so far, this has been accurate. It's a mixed-favoring-unpleasant month, but both the happy and unhappy moments are more pronounced than "average."

I agree with the interpretation and think you need both numbers to draw that conclusion.

Demi-SLR Mar 2 -
Benefic 7
Malefic 0
(+7)

Well, there goes my ratio idea LOL (division by 7).

Clearly all benefic factors. My hypothesis about this being above the 4.5ish threshold isn't so much that it's entirely pleasant and not at all unpleasant, but that even the pleasantness is noticeably higher than "average."

Got it. And (without having the 4.5-ish number) I probably wouldn't make a big deal of anything that was 4-0 or less. (All benefic, yes, but not a very loud chart. That's not even one Class 1 benefic planet.)

SLR Mar 15 -
Benefic 9
Malefic 1.5
(+7.5)
Similar score-interpretation as the previous chart, but with both more good and more bad.
Etc. Is this something you do also? I might've seen you do it and then thought it was my idea; I don't remember

I wouldn't worry about the "more bad." Think of the bars (which I love in concept) as being a seesaw: This one clearly tips benefic. In the best circumstances, for a consumer-facing app we want an unambiguous "this will be a good two weeks" or "this will be a bad two weeks," knowing that we have to be diplomatic when it's a mix. A score of 9 to 1.5 I'd just say: "On balance, this will be a good period!"

My fantasy has been a phone app with four colored bars (or more, if we can develop other vectors sufficiently).

I'm screwing around with Busy = Mercuries, Marses, half Suns. I know there's an argument for things like Saturns, maybe Moons, etc, but just to start someplace...

I tried one called "shifting conditions." I wanted to keep Uranus and Pluto points in the transformation category [even though I call that one Change for now], and something else for "stuff around me just keeps changing" - rearranging the pieces rather than getting outside the framework. I wasn't happy with it. It was Moon score plus Uranus score. Maybe there is a Moon + Mercury "flurry" to get.

[Ember Nyx]

Demi-SLR Mar 2 -
Benefic 7
Malefic 0
(+7)

Well, there goes my ratio idea LOL (division by 7).

I think a ratio would really shine for heavily mixed months, like my current SLR. Even with something like the benefic 9, malefic 1.5 chart, you get a +6.0 ratio, which kind of becomes the same measurement as the +7.5 combined score.

Clearly all benefic factors. My hypothesis about this being above the 4.5ish threshold isn't so much that it's entirely pleasant and not at all unpleasant, but that even the pleasantness is noticeably higher than "average."

Got it. And (without having the 4.5-ish number) I probably wouldn't make a big deal of anything that was 4-0 or less. (All benefic, yes, but not a very loud chart. That's not even one Class 1 benefic planet.)

Saying it like that makes me think of the rules around ingress dormancy. Maybe it's fair to phrase it like:
A chart with benefic 3, malefic 1.5 is mixed-leaning-slightly-positive, (+1.5 combined, or ratio +2.0), but both scores are weak enough that it's not prominently pleasant nor prominently unpleasant, even if it is prominently something else concrete (like a chart with Class 1 Sun-Pluto or whatever).