Skyscript Astrology Forum

Varuna,

Having read Chapter 37 of BPHS I am left with a concern. It is this: to what degree do these yogas dominate other indications in the horoscope? Can they overturn them? Must they work with them? Or can they be made ineffective by the presence of other yogas such as Gajakesari yoga or Hamsa yoga?

For example, in Ian Brady's chart (sorry, Varuna, but the chart sits on my desk as I write) there is a kedara yoga - all the planets are spread over four houses. The result (verse 46) are that the person

will be a benefactor to many, will do agricultural work, be truthful, happy, fickleminded and wealthy.

Brady was none of these. His vargottama Mars, as lord of ascendant, and the strength of the ascendant (unoccupied and unaspected) bolstered his will power indicating that he is singleminded rather than fickleminded. Over decades in prison, he has refused to reveal the whereabouts of the body of one child victim. (His determined vargottama Mars aspects the second house, which is occupied by Ketu: He will not speak, he will take his secret to the grave.) He is on hunger strike, a strategy that takes great will power. He is kept alive by medical means against his will.

He was not involved in agricultural labor; he was a civil servant, indicating that he had a fair degree of intelligence. Mercury, lord of third, occupies the ninth house not merely in association with Venus but in partile conjunction with it. Intellectual ability is present. He is decietful and secretive rather than truthful and open (Ketu in the second aspected by Mars and Saturn?). He is not wealthy. I doubt he is happy, and he has not been 'a benefactor to many'. In short, kedara yoga is, apparently, eclipsed.

Melissa

Varuna,

I propose we move away from Brady's chart. How would you feel about us discussing that of the American author Gore Vidal - a long life and a literary career that began at 19!

The data is 3 October 1925, 10:00 a.m., West Point, NY, USA. The data has a Rodden rating of AA, though 10.00 a.m. seems to be rather too neat a time to be true!

Or select your own subject. I have a wide range of interests. In the main, I'm interested in people.

Melissa

Varuna

Gore Vidal has kedara yoga, i.e. all the planets confined to four houses. In the previous example, the four houses were contiguous - 9th, 10th, 11th 12th. In Vidal's chart, they are spread around the chart: 2nd, 6th, 11th, 12th. If you do not accept this as a kedara yoga, I will set the idea aside. I am not interested in arguing who is right and who wrong. I would prefer to investigate those parts of the chart we agree upon. Expansion of knowledge and understanding is preferable to fruitless squabbling.

The results of kedara yoga are given in BPHS, chapter 47, verse 46 as: the person

will be a benefactor to many, will do agricultural work, be truthful, happy, fickleminded and wealthy.

When the text says that the native will be a benefactor to many, I think it means they will be charitable, helping others through gifts of money as wealthy people like the Guggenheim family (Guggenheim Foundation) and Lord Nuffield in Britain and Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist, (Noble prizes) have done. Vidal isn't known for charitable works.

He is, however, in most people's estimation wealthy. Vidal's ambition as a young man was to earn enough money by the time he was thirty to be able to stop working for anybody else and to please himself what he did. Having achieved this aim, it was then, I believe, that he wrote 'Julian', taking up once again his role as novelist that had remained dormant as he built up his wealth working in TV and the movies.

I have nothing to say about Vidal's veracity or his happiness or lack of same, but he seems to show no interest in doing agricultural work, his energies being focused on what his friend, the novelist Muriel Spark ('The Prime of Miss Jean Brody'), called 'brain work'.

I am interested in the question: Supposing kedara yoga exists in this chart, to what extent is it operative? Clearly it is not fully operative. So what other factors in the chart render it inoperative?

Vidal is wealthy as per kedara yoga, but as much is prefigured by Jupiter's presence in the 2nd, in his own sign, under the aspect of Lagna lord Mars; and lord of 2nd from Chandra Lagna in association with yoga karaka Saturn (from Chandra Lagna) exalted in Libra.

Melissa

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Varuna,

Maybe I should not have referred you to Chapter 37 (not 47) of BPHS, to consider those nabhasa yogas. . . . The reason I referred you to them is merely because there was a different portrayal of the kona/trine relationship, when there are many of them in a chart.

Yes; I understood that, and I am grateful to you for pointing me to them: I look at kona (and kendra) dispositions with a more careful eye now.

Also, the kedara yoga is a class of sankhya yogas within the category of nabhasa yogas and in verse 17 it states: "These [sankhya] yogas will be operable only if none of the nabhasa yogas explained previously are derivable." Now, none of the nabhasa yogas explained previously are applicable to these 2 chart examples, however, it suggests to me that the sankhya class of yogas is not as strong as the other nabhasa yogas.

On that last point: that is my feeling too.

Behari: "Fiery speeches, revolutionary writings, or complete absorption in the engineering field are some of the activities that an individual may undertake when Mars is in Virgo in the 11th..."

Vidal wrote a book with the catchy title of: 'Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace' - we hardly have to read the book to know the criticisms it contains, although I did read it once upon a time. Vidal is known for his criticisms of politics and politicians. According to wikipedia Vidal made this statement: "essentially, there is no difference between the two parties [democrat and republican parties of the U.S.]." Therefore, the Mars in the 11th in Virgo is shining through.

Vidal has never been afraid to court controversy.

Behari: Moon in Aries in 6th: "With the Moon in this sign...The native may feel ineffective and suffer from kapha. He is sometimes subjected to scandal..."

According to wikipedia: "[Vidal] has suggested that President Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese to attack the U.S. at Pearl Harbor to facilitate American entry to the war, and believes FDR had advance knowledge of the attack. During an interview in the 2005 documentary Why We Fight, Vidal asserts that during the final months of World War II, the Japanese had tried to surrender to the United States, to no avail. He said, 'They were trying to surrender all that summer, but Truman wouldn't listen, because Truman wanted to drop the bombs.' When the interviewer asked why, Vidal replied, 'To show off. To frighten Stalin. To change the balance of power in the world. To declare war on communism. Perhaps we were starting a pre-emptive world war.'

It is hard to know on what Vidal bases this opinion. He is the scion of two political families: the Vidals and the Gores, related to Al Gore an erstwhile presidential nominee. His station at birth is reflected in the condition of Lagna. It is hemmed in by Venus in its own sign on one side and Jupiter in its own sign on the other. Lagnadhipathi Mars, meanwhile, is in the 11th with the lord of the 11th and lord of the 10th, Sun, a yoga karaka for Scorpio lagna. He could have inside knowledge; or the above may be merely his opinion.

There have been several scandals throughout the course of the life, as per the Behari quote. The publication of The City and the Pillar caused a scandal when he was young, as did the publication of Myra Breckenridge at a later stage in his career. In his private life, publication of Two Sisters contributed to a breach between himself and Jackie Kennedy and her sister Lee Radziwill, to whom he was at one time related by marriage ? if I recall aright they were for a time step-siblings.

From these and other expositions of planetary positions and interactions that you make, I think it is clear that we are in agreement on the birth chart, which is not radically different whichever ayanamsha it is viewed from; nor does the adjustment for the rectified birth time alter the constitution of the chart greatly, neither that drawn according to the Lahiri ayanamsha nor that drawn according to the Fagan-Bradley ayanamsha.

As this is the Disposition of Planets thread, I would be interested in looking at the disposition of planets in Vidal?s chart/s. The distribution in the rashi chart is:-

2/12: 6
3/11: 3
4/10: 3
5/9 : 1
6/8 : 3
7/7 : 2

Unfortunately, I find nothing remarkable in this, unless it be the low incidence of 5/9 distributions.

I have seen a high incidence of Dwirdwadasa (2/12 dispositions) associated with a difficult life or a struggle to become successful. But although there are more occurrences of this disposition in the chart than any other, I have the impression that the configuration we find here ? 3 planets in the 11th, 2 planets in the 12th ? is not what authors had in mind when they spoke of ?a high incidence of Dwirdwadasa? in a chart. In B.V. Raman?s Notable Horoscopes, the author only invokes this rule (so far as I can recall) when the planets are exclusively or wholly singletons within signs; for instance, where Venus is in one sign, Sun in the next and Mercury in the next after that, followed by Jupiter, Saturn and Moon all alone (unassociated) in the signs they occupy.

Vidal?s navamsha comes closer to that paradigm, where, using the version resulting from adherence to the Lahiri ayanamsha, Saturn is in Pisces, Mars in Aries, Mercury and Moon in Taurus, Venus and Sun in Gemini. To an outsider, Vidal does not seem to have struggled to become a success; on the contrary there appears to have been a steady rise and rise in fame and fortune over the decades, leveling out in the ?70s. Features of the navamsha distribution of planets that possibly redeem the spread of Dwirdwadasa planets across four signs include: Mars in own sign, Moon in exaltation and sambhanda between Mercury and Venus. I would be interested, however, to hear other people?s opinions on this point.

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Varuna,

So as there's no confusion of terms:
You note that there are 5 planets in 2/12 disposition to one another in Vidal's rashi. That is right. I have counted this as 6 pairings:

Saturn/Mars in 2/12 disposition
Saturn/Sun in 2/12 disposition
Saturn/Mercury in 2/12 disposition
Venus/Mars in 2/12 disposition
Venus/Sun in 2/12 disposition
Venus/Mercury in 2/12 disposition

On to another topic:

I was also wondering about Vidal's success. The only thing angular about Vidal's chart is from the Chandra lagna. The navamsha chart has a couple of angular planets with both ayanamshas, but the karakamsha has even more angularity, and the Fagan karakamsha has the most.

I am not so perplexed about Vidal?s success. Not that I know the astrological explanation for it! It's more that I feel there must be an explanation. In Raman's Notable Nativities there are several examples of individuals who have become famous - more famous than Vidal - who have few or no planets in angles. In the chart for Genghis Khan (p. 82), all planets bar Moon are in the third house. Moon and the Nodes occupy angles. According to Raman, the raja yogas formed by the crowding together of six planets in the third correspond with Genghis's rise to power. I'm not saying that the chart is the actual birth chart of Genghis Khan - the time of birth certainly is speculative. I'm merely saying that other factors in a horoscope may override the general rule that it is planets in kendras which indicate that a person will achieve fame or high position.

Genghis?s chart is not the best example. It is the one that sticks in my mind (because it shows six planets in association). There are other examples of the rule stating that several/many planets have to occupy kendras in order to denote worldly/material success or high political office being rendered ineffective by raja yogas occurring in houses other than angles in Raman?s book but I don?t have the leisure to go looking them out right now. Quickly flicking through N.N. searching for possible subjects, I see that the British Queen Victoria had only Sun and Moon in lagna, no planets in other kendras. In the navamsha, Sun is again in lagna, no planets in the remaining three kendras, and no planets in a kendra from the Moon. Other things in the chart indicate her position, during her reign, as monarch of an Empire over which it was symbolically said the sun never set: Moon not only exalted but vargottama; Sun exalted and in a kendra in navamsha; lagnadhipathi Venus in association with Mercury lord of 2nd and 5th in rashi, and so on. In respect of the Vidal chart, I note that Queen Victoria?s Venus/Mercury association falls in the 12th house, just as Vidal?s Venus/Saturn association does.