Much to her credit, Mother India remains one of the few places on Earth where astrology (to be carefully distinguished from astronomy) is still regarded as a legitimate academic discipline and where Universities still retain entire departments devoted to this traditional science. It has long since disappeared from the Western Academy and been relegated to the status of fringe science. In India it continues to have a serious place in intellectual life as well as in the daily life of honest Indians.
This fact sends the nation’s leftist intelligentsia – largely made up, as elsewhere, of Marxist atheists - into paroxyms of rage, and they have long campaigned in the court system and through other means to expel the astrologers from the academy. It has fallen to so-called “right-wing” political groups and much-loathed “New Hitlers” like Prime Minister Modi to defend astrology (and aryavedic medicine and other traditional sciences besides) as an important part of the nation’s Hindoo heritage.
This political alignment is not much appreciated in the West. There the situation is somewhat different. Astrology is largely the hobby of ‘New Age’ leftist liberals congregating in inner urban coffee shops, while so-called “conservatives” (actually just crony capitalists) tend to champion the hard sciences and the rationalist and utilitarian outlook of the Enlightenment which they construe as the ‘Western Tradition’. It is a topsy-turvy alignment. In the West the residues of the traditional sciences find a home among the mushy genderless feel-good New Agers and progressive trendies; in India, more correctly, they are defended by the reactionaries, the old anti-modernist nationalists against the young tradition-hating intellectual elite.
As the present writer has witnessed, it drives the latter party to distraction when and where these misalignments meet, such as when young backpacking hippies from Europe travel to places like Benares (which is, by the way, the parliamentary constituency and political stronghold of Prime Minister Modi) to take courses in ‘Vedic’ (or ‘Jyotish’) astrology. Don’t they realize that their Indian counterparts – university educated urban-based young people – associate astrology with the old order and such evils as arranged marriages? Why do these young Europeans – with their bright purple dhotis and Bob Marley tee-shirts, their lesbian relationships and ‘One World’ ideology – indulge all of this traditional rot? Don’t they understand that things like astrology are exactly what progressive young Indians hate and want gone? It is amusing. Two cultures at cross-purposes.
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During his extended stay in traditional Benares the present author was fortunate to discuss ‘Vedic’ astrology with several of its local practitioners. It is, of course, a very complex matter, and so only the absolute basics were canvassed, but even so it was enough to give him some sense of it. The first and most compelling thing about it from his point of view, was that this astrology, unlike that now current in the West, has not itself been infected by the unwarranted distortions and unintelligent innovations of modernity: it is, indeed, still largely traditional. In northern India, though, this means – ironically – that it still preserves the essential features of the Hellenistic astrological tradition that was carried to India by Alexander and also by the Muslim invasions.
‘Vedic’ astrology, that is, is hardly very Vedic – it is, rather, a Graeco-Islamic astrology that has been naturalized into the older Indian systems. In this respect it is a parallel case to so-called ‘Unani’ medicine which is, in fact, Graeco-Islamic (Gallenic/Hellenic) medicine which has been naturalized to northern India and survives there long after it has died out and been anathemized in the West. The author had suspected as much. His encounter with ‘Vedic’ astrology in Benares confirmed it entirely. When one strips away the Hindoo names and other Hindooizing features, ‘Vedic’ astrology – at least in the north of India, since the south is somewhat different in its history – is largely an Hellenic astrology and as such recognizably akin to familiar Western astrology before the latter was modernized into its present form.
The differences are important. Vedic astrology reminds us of what Western astrology was like before it was reconstructed by such people as Alan Leo in the XIXth century. The present author, it should be disclosed here, is no great enthusiast of contemporary astrology in the West, and regards it as decadent in several important respects. He was thus very happy to encounter a more integral Western astrology – albeit dressed up as ‘Vedic’ - in contemporary India.
Two elements of modern Western astrology are missing in its Vedic cousin: the use of the round chart, and the use of the modern trans-Saturnian planets. These are the chief elements added to Western astrology by modernizers and that served to sever it from its older expressions and that, as far as this writer is concerned, violated some of the science’s most integral symbolism. All astrology degenerates into superstition. This is certainly so in India, as anywhere else, but modern Western astrology is deviationist in an even more fundamental sense. Modernizers (such as Alan Leo) tampered unintelligently with its most basic constituent parts, its most important symbols, and accordingly turned it into a superstition proper. More than any other innovations, the round chart – as opposed to the square – and the new planets – as opposed to the ancient seven – have made modern Western astrology a nonsense. By comparison – happily - Vedic astrology is still intact.
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There is insufficient space to detail here all the ways in which these innovations have brought Western astrology to ruin. Suffice to say that the present author is an astrological traditionalist – a purist even - and in particular subscribes to the astrology – as a science of symbols – inherited by the Platonic tradition, and especially as found preserved in the writings of one Julius Firmicus Maternus. As such he looks down with disdain upon deviations from this heritage as outright abominations. And, inasmuch as he ever engages in the astrological arts, he still uses the square chart and still confines himself to the ancient planets seven, just as do the Vedic practitioners. These features have a cogent and integral symbolism that is indispensable in the scheme of things. To depart from either is to fall into heresy pure and simple.
The most compelling defense of the both the square chart and the seven planets – and rebuttal of the round variant and the new planets – is that the traditional arrangement is founded in the solid evidence of direct human experience. One can see the traditional seven planets with the naked eye, that is to say, whereas the modern trans-Saturnians planets (how many of these are there these days? The astronomers cannot agree) are abstractions only accessible through a telescope. The traditional cosmology is human scale. And similarly, the square chart corresponds to direct human perception, since it divides the sub-lunary realm into four quadrants and emphasizes four facts, namely the points of “culmination” in the movements of the heavenly bodies. If human beings – and astrologers – had not stopped observing the heavens every night this fact would not require any explanation. Yet it does.
“Culmination” is an obvious fact to the naked eye. We see it very clearly when the moon rises in the east. Often it will appear above the eastern horizon as huge in size. Often too the setting sun will appear to be huge on the western horizon. Indeed, the points of rising and setting, magnify astral phenomena. Similarly, when the sun is at its zenith its heat is fiercest and when the moon is at its zenith its light is brightest. These too are points of culmination. There are four such points: east, west, above, below. In these four places – according to all traditional astrological understandings – heavenly bodies and their influences upon mundane affairs are at their strongest. These are called the ‘cardinal houses’. The square chart of the heavens used in traditional astrology illustrates this. At a glance, in the square chart, one can see this most important feature of the heavens: what planets occupy the ‘cardinal houses’, what planets are rising, setting or culminating. The round chart used by modern Western astrologers obscures this emphasis. It treats space and spatial angles as homogenous. Thereupon it opens astrology to a wealth of misunderstandings and symbolic errors. As if the various ‘houses’ are equal in importance and strength! Only someone who does not really appreciate to what visual realities the astrological chart corresponds could entertain such a basic fallacy. In traditional astrology the earth is, if not flat, then at least square.
The four angles of culmination.
The four angular or cardinal houses. Planets found in these locations are said to be "on the angles".
An intelligent and symbolically coherent astrology, therefore – and one that remains human scale and so embodies rather than violates the correspondence between micro and macrocosms, surely a desideratum of any astrology whatsoever! – will retain the use of the square chart and will shy away from the reckless use of heavenly bodies that cannot be observed by the unaided human eye and are only known to egg-heads sitting at radiotelescopes in the Rocky Mountains. Such was Hellenic astrology, and the astrology of the Saracens, and that of medieval Europe, and such is the closely related astrology of India today.
Yours,
Harper McAlpine Black
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