Learning Vedic Astrology

That is usually the beginning of a good conversation, so let me have it with you here.

Where it comes from

Jyotish grew up in India. Its roots are in the Vedas, the oldest scriptures of the Hindu tradition, where the sky was watched to fix the right time for ritual, and the Moon's path through the twenty seven lunar mansions was already being recorded. Out of that grew a full astrology, set down in classical texts over many centuries, and the one most practitioners still quote is the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, the great text attributed to the sage Parashara.

What makes Jyotish different from almost any other old astrology is that it never stopped. In the West astrology was pushed to the edges for a few hundred years and had to be rebuilt. In India it was taught from teacher to student the whole time and still is. A family there will have a chart drawn at a child's birth and will consult it at marriage and at the start of a business. It is a working tradition with a working vocabulary, and some of that vocabulary is Sanskrit, so I will give you each word once and in plain English beside it.

What it shares with the Western chart

More than you might expect.

It is the same sky. The same Sun, the same Moon, the same five planets you can see with your eyes, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The same twelve signs with the same names in translation, Mesha is Aries, Vrishabha is Taurus and so on round to Meena, which is Pisces. The same twelve houses, the same idea that a planet in a sign in a house describes a part of your life. The same rulerships: Mars rules Aries, Venus rules Taurus, the Moon rules Cancer, the Sun rules Leo. If you have read the Western pages in this library, you already know half of this one.

Both traditions almost certainly share a common ancestor somewhere in the ancient Near East, and they traded ideas with each other for centuries. They are cousins, and they argue the way cousins do.

Where the two part company

Six things, and I will take them in the order they will matter to you.

The zodiac. Jyotish measures the signs against the fixed stars, the sidereal zodiac, where Western astrology measures them from the March equinox, the tropical zodiac. The gap between the two is about 24 degrees at the moment, so most people's planets sit one sign back in the Vedic chart. The Sidereal and Tropical page works through this properly, including why neither side is wrong.

The Moon first. Where the Western chart leads with the Sun, Jyotish leads with the Moon. Your Moon sign, measured against the stars, is your rashi, and it is the sign a Vedic astrologer means when they ask what you are. The Moon is read as the mind itself, the whole inner weather of a person, and the Sun as the soul's purpose underneath it.

The nakshatras. The Moon's path is divided into twenty seven lunar mansions, each spanning 13 degrees 20 minutes, each with its own ruler, deity, symbol and temperament. The one your Moon was in at birth is the nakshatra, and I read it before anything else in the Vedic chart. The Nakshatras index introduces all twenty seven.

Whole Sign houses. Jyotish takes the sign on the eastern horizon at birth, the Ascendant or lagna, and makes that whole sign the first house, the next sign the second house and so on. It is the simplest house system there is, and it is the one I already cross check on every Western chart I read. The Bhavas page covers it.

The dashas. Instead of leaning on transits, Jyotish divides a life into planetary periods, the dashas, each ruled by a planet and each lasting a set number of years. Which period you were born into is set by the ruler of your Moon's nakshatra. The Dashas page explains the cycle.

Rahu and Ketu. Jyotish uses the two nodes of the Moon, the points where the Moon's path crosses the Sun's, as planets in their own right, and gives them names and characters. Western astrology knows them as the North Node and South Node and uses them more quietly. In Jyotish they are shadow planets, and they carry the themes of obsession and release, the unfinished and the let go. The Grahas page gives them the room they deserve.

Jyotish also leaves out Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. It was complete before they were found, and the classical system works with nine grahas, the seven visible lights and the two nodes.

What I take from it and what I leave

I take the Moon's nakshatra, which in my experience describes the texture of a person's inner life more precisely than any single Western placement does. I take the sidereal Sun and Moon and set them beside the Western ones without swapping either out. I take the Whole Sign houses as a cross check and the current dasha as a sense of the season someone is in.

I leave the fortune telling. Jyotish is often sold as a system that will tell you exactly when the big events of your life will happen, and there are practitioners who read it that way. I read it as character and timing, never as a sentence. A hard placement is a piece of work and a mirror, in this tradition as in every other one.

I also leave the remedies. Jyotish has a long tradition of gemstones, mantras and offerings prescribed to soften a difficult planet. I respect it and I do not practise it. I would rather you understood the planet.

How this section is laid out

After this page, Sidereal and Tropical explains the two zodiacs and the one sign back rule. The Grahas covers the nine planets, The Bhavas the twelve houses, and The Dashas the planetary periods. Then The Nakshatras gives each of the twenty seven lunar mansions its own page, and The Rashis gives each of the twelve signs its own page, read as your sidereal Moon first and your sidereal Sun second, each one paired with its Western sign page in The Signs.

Where to start

Find your sidereal Moon. My readings compute it, and the Find Your Numbers and Signs page will add it soon. Read the rashi page for that sign, then the nakshatra page for the mansion inside it, and put them beside the Western Moon in the Signs page for your tropical Moon. Where the three agree, you have found something solid. Where they differ, you have found something worth thinking about.

One more thing before you go. The Ascendant, the houses and the dasha all need a reliable birth time, within about fifteen minutes. So does the nakshatra if your Moon was anywhere near a boundary, because the Moon crosses one in about a day. "About 2 am" is a different chart.

Which would you rather know first, who you are or when things will happen? Jyotish has an answer to both, and I will always give you the first.

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.