The Basics
What Are Astrodynes?
Astrodynes — also commonly called Cosmodynes — are a numerical scoring system that measures the strength and quality of every planet and house in your birth chart. Think of them as astrology's answer to the question every student eventually asks: "Which planets actually matter most in this chart — and are they helping or hurting?"
Most astrological analysis is qualitative. An astrologer looks at a chart and says "Saturn is strong here" or "Venus is well-placed." Astrodynes make that judgment quantitative and objective — Saturn isn't just "strong," it has a power score of 52 and a harmony score of +18, which means it's one of the most influential planets in the chart and it's working positively.
Astrodynes answer two questions for every planet in your chart: How much influence does this planet have? And is that influence constructive or destructive?
Every planet gets two numbers: a Power score and a Harmony/Discord score. Every house in the chart gets the same. These numbers can be compared — to each other, to statistical averages, and most importantly for our purposes, to the same chart relocated to a different city.
History
Where Astrodynes Come From
Astrodynes were developed by C.C. Zain, the pen name of Elbert Benjamine, founder of The Brotherhood of Light and one of the most systematic thinkers in 20th century astrology. Working from the 1920s through the 1950s, Zain sought to bring scientific rigor to astrological analysis at a time when most practice was entirely intuitive.
His goal was straightforward: create a consistent, repeatable method for measuring planetary strength that any astrologer could apply to any chart and arrive at the same result. The system he developed — later refined by his colleagues and published as the Astrodynes Manual — assigns numerical weights to every factor that influences a planet's strength: its house position, the aspects it forms, its sign dignity, and whether those aspects are harmonious or discordant.
Astrodynes vs Cosmodynes — What's the Difference?
Nothing, essentially. "Astrodynes" is the original Brotherhood of Light term. "Cosmodynes" became widely used later and refers to the same system. You'll see both names in the literature and in software. Stellar Moves uses "Astrodynes" as the primary term to honor the original work, with "Cosmodynes" noted as an alternate name.
For decades, calculating Astrodynes meant working through lengthy tables by hand — a process that could take hours for a single chart. This is one reason the system never became mainstream despite its analytical power: it was simply too laborious for busy practitioners. Modern software changes that entirely. Stellar Moves calculates the full Astrodyne profile instantly, including the relocations comparison that makes the system so valuable for locational work.
The Critical Distinction
Power vs Harmony — The Most Important Thing to Understand
This is the insight that most people miss when they first encounter Astrodynes — and getting it right changes everything about how you read a chart.
Power and harmony are completely independent measurements. A planet can be extremely powerful and extremely harmonious. It can be extremely powerful and extremely discordant. It can be weak and harmonious, or weak and discordant. These four combinations produce very different life experiences — and they cannot be collapsed into a single "good planet / bad planet" judgment.
Power
Measures how much influence a planet exerts over your life. A high-power planet is prominent — its themes show up constantly. A low-power planet operates quietly in the background. Power is neither good nor bad by itself. It simply measures how much.
Harmony / Discord
Measures the quality of that influence — whether the planet's energy expresses constructively (+harmony) or destructively (+discord) in your life. Harmony brings ease, opportunity, and positive expression. Discord brings friction, obstacles, and the shadow side of the planet's themes.
Why This Matters — Four Real Scenarios
| Planet | Power | Harmony/Discord | What This Means in Life |
|---|---|---|---|
| Saturn ♄ | High | +Harmonious | Discipline, achievement, structure come easily. Career ambitions are supported. Responsibilities feel manageable and rewarding. |
| Saturn ♄ | High | +Discordant | Saturn's themes dominate but create friction — heavy responsibilities, delays, obstacles. Hard work without proportional reward. Limitation is a recurring theme. |
| Venus ♀ | High | +Harmonious | Love, beauty, social ease flow naturally. Relationships tend to be warm and rewarding. Financial comfort is often present. |
| Venus ♀ | High | +Discordant | Venus themes dominate but express negatively — relationship turbulence, indulgence, financial impracticality, or attracting partners who disappoint. |
A powerful planet is not a lucky planet. Power amplifies whatever the planet naturally does — harmony determines whether that amplification works in your favor.
This distinction is also what makes relocation so analytically interesting. When you move to a new city, your power scores stay relatively stable (the planets don't change) but your harmony scores can shift significantly — especially for planets near house cusps. Finding a location that improves the harmony of your most powerful planets is the core goal of locational astrology done rigorously.
The Mechanics
How Astrodynes Are Calculated
You don't need to understand the calculation to use Astrodynes effectively — but understanding the ingredients helps you interpret the scores more intuitively. A planet's Astrodyne score is built from three sources:
1. House Position Power
The house a planet occupies is the largest single contributor to its power score. Angular houses (1st, 4th, 7th, 10th) confer the most power — planets here are on the front stage of your life, visible and active. Succedent houses (2nd, 5th, 8th, 11th) are moderately powerful. Cadent houses (3rd, 6th, 9th, 12th) contribute the least house power.
This is why relocation matters so much in the Astrodyne system: moving changes your house cusps, which changes which house every planet occupies, which directly changes that planet's power score. A natal Mars in your 12th house (cadent, low power) might move to your 1st house (angular, high power) when you relocate — dramatically amplifying Mars themes in your relocated life.
2. Aspect Power and Harmony
Every aspect a planet forms contributes both power and harmony/discord. Harmonious aspects (trines, sextiles) add to the harmony score. Discordant aspects (squares, oppositions, some conjunctions) add to the discord score. The orb of the aspect matters — an exact aspect carries more weight than a wide one. The power of the planets involved also matters — an aspect to the Sun or Moon carries more weight than an aspect to a slower outer planet.
3. Sign Dignity
A planet in its ruling sign or exaltation receives a harmony bonus. A planet in detriment or fall receives a discord penalty. These are smaller contributions than house position or aspects, but they add up — and they don't change with relocation, which means they represent a constant underlying quality in how the planet expresses.
What Stellar Moves Calculates
Stellar Moves implements the complete Astrodyne algorithm including house position power, all major and minor aspects with correct orb weighting, parallel aspects, sign dignity (rulership, exaltation, detriment, fall), mutual reception bonuses, and exact exaltation degree bonuses.
Most software that claims to calculate Astrodynes omits several of these factors, producing inaccurate scores. Stellar Moves targets the original Brotherhood of Light published tables as the benchmark for accuracy.
Reading the Numbers
Reading Planet Astrodyne Scores
When you run a chart in Stellar Moves, every planet gets a Power score and a net Harmony/Discord score. Here's how to orient yourself to those numbers.
What's a "Normal" Power Score?
There's no single normal — power scores vary considerably between charts. As a rough orientation: a planet with power under 15 is relatively quiet in the chart. Between 15 and 40 is moderate influence. Above 40 is a prominent planet. Above 60 is a dominant planet — its themes will be central to the person's life story. Scores above 80 are exceptional and indicate a planet that essentially defines major life chapters.
What's a "Normal" Harmony Score?
Harmony scores are net figures — positive means more harmonious aspects than discordant, negative means more discord. A score near zero is mixed or neutral. Roughly: scores above +10 indicate a noticeably harmonious planet. Below −10 indicates notable discord. Scores beyond ±20 are significant. Beyond ±30 are pronounced and will be clearly felt in the life areas that planet rules.
Example scores for illustration — not from a real chart.
In this example, Saturn is the dominant planet — most powerful in the chart and strongly harmonious. This person likely experiences Saturn themes (structure, discipline, career, long-term achievement) as a source of strength and success rather than burden. The Moon, by contrast, is moderate in power but discordant — emotional life and domestic matters may feel more challenging.
The Luminaries — Sun and Moon
The Sun and Moon warrant special attention because they receive a built-in power multiplier in the Astrodyne system. They are the chart's two most fundamentally important bodies — even with modest house positions and few aspects, they tend to score highly. If the Sun or Moon is discordant in your chart, that quality tends to color many areas of life rather than remaining isolated to a single domain.
The Houses
Reading House Astrodyne Scores
House Astrodynes work by a different mechanism than planet scores. A house's score is determined by which planets occupy it and what those planets contribute — plus the power of the planet that rules the sign on that house's cusp.
An empty house isn't necessarily weak — it depends heavily on where its ruling planet sits and how that planet scores. A 7th house with no planets but whose ruler (say, Venus) is powerful and harmonious elsewhere in the chart will still show reasonable 7th house scores. Conversely, a house crowded with discordant planets will show high power but significant discord — meaning that life area is active but turbulent.
What the Houses Represent
| House | Life Domain |
|---|---|
| 1st | Identity, physical body, first impressions, overall vitality |
| 2nd | Personal finances, material resources, values, earning ability |
| 3rd | Communication, siblings, short travel, local environment, learning |
| 4th | Home, family, roots, real estate, the end of life |
| 5th | Creativity, children, romance, pleasure, speculation |
| 6th | Health, daily work, service, habits, pets |
| 7th | Partnership, marriage, open enemies, contracts |
| 8th | Transformation, shared resources, inheritance, mortality |
| 9th | Philosophy, higher education, long travel, foreign cultures, publishing |
| 10th | Career, public reputation, authority, life direction |
| 11th | Friends, community, aspirations, groups, social causes |
| 12th | Hidden matters, solitude, spiritual practice, self-undoing |
When you're assessing whether a location is favorable for you, look at the houses most relevant to your purpose for relocating. Moving for career? Focus on the 10th house harmony score. Moving for love or partnership? Watch the 7th. Looking for a place to build wealth? The 2nd and 8th. Health concerns? The 1st and 6th.
The Core Application
Astrodynes and Relocation
This is where Astrodynes become genuinely transformative as a locational tool. When you move, your birth planets stay fixed in the zodiac — but your house cusps change based on your new latitude and longitude. That means every planet potentially shifts to a new house, changing both its power score and its harmony/discord balance.
The relocation comparison in Stellar Moves shows you exactly what changes — side by side, natal vs relocated scores for every planet and every house. You can see at a glance: which planets gain or lose power, which houses become more or less harmonious, and what the net effect on your overall chart balance is.
You're not looking for a perfect city. You're looking for a city where your most powerful planets are better supported — and where the houses most important to your current life goals score more harmoniously.
Why It Matters
The Innovation in Stellar Moves
Most locational astrology software focuses on Astro*Carto*Graphy alone. You see your planetary lines on a map and make qualitative judgments about which lines seem favorable. This is a valuable starting point — but it leaves enormous analytical territory unexplored.
Integrating Astrodynes with locational analysis means you can go from "Mars line runs through this city, which could mean energy and drive or conflict and aggression — hard to say" to "Mars has a power score of 44 and a harmony score of +19 in your natal chart, so activating Mars in this location is likely to work well for you — and the relocated chart shows Mars moving from your 6th to your 1st house, which confirms the increase in personal energy and initiative."
That's a qualitatively different level of analysis. The Astrodyne numbers give you a way to evaluate the planetary lines that Astro*Carto*Graphy identifies — and to rank cities not just by which lines they're near, but by how those lines interact with the specific quality of those planets in your individual chart.
No other publicly available application integrates Astrodynes, relocation chart analysis, and Astro*Carto*Graphy into a single workflow. That integration is what Stellar Moves was built to provide.
The goal was never to replace the astrologer's judgment — it's to give that judgment a quantitative foundation it hasn't had before. When a client asks "should I move to Berlin or Tokyo?", you can now answer that question with numbers behind you, not just intuition.