Now is heaven the readier to favor those who search out its secrets.
- Marcus Manilius
Immanuel is an ancient name that means God is with us. Since the planetary bodies and celestial objects were once seen as gods, and astrology once revered as a study of those gods to make sense of their (seemingly) erratic movements, it seems an appropriate name for a package which aims to translate complex astronomical data into simple astrology chart data.
Immanuel makes it incredibly easy to generate simple, chart-centric data based on the Swiss Ephemeris from within your Python application. While pysweph does an excellent job of providing detailed astronomical and house data, there are many steps to translating this into meaningful chart data, such as what planets are in which signs and houses, and the aspects between them. This is where Immanuel comes in.
Not only are the basics covered, but more complex calculations such as composites and secondary progressions are also taken care of, with many options to customize them.
Since there are seemingly infinite ways to interpret astronomical data into astrological, Immanuel seeks to align much of its output with that of astro.com as this is arguably the most popular free go-to for many amateur and even professional astrologers.
Although it does not offer the vast amount of options or complexity as astro.com and many of the professional astrology software suites, it does generate the most commonly needed charts and their data in great detail and with much flexibility. As well as generating human-friendly output, all of its data is JSON-serializable and highly configurable, making it ideal both for feeding to AI and for powering APIs.
Some confusion might arise with the word "object" - since an astrological chart can contain much more than just planets, anything that can appear within the chart and make aspects is referred to as a "chart object". However, since Python is indeed an object-oriented language, the code itself generates Python objects. The documentation therefore makes an effort to spell out "chart object" vs "Python object" to avoid confusion (and to avoid trying to explain why you'll have a chart object full of chart objects which are object objects).