Skyscript Astrology Forum

Pete, not to jump on you, or anything, but your "strong feeling" is no substitute for a system that was carefully observed and validated by roughly 3200 BCE, around the time of The Mahabarata. Western classical astrologers had not yet crawled out of the cradle and figured out how to point at the sky by this date.

You're absolutely right SD. I have a great deal of respect for classical astrology and I should know better than to question 5000 years of tradition.

Ketu was associated with Mars, not Saturn.

The reason I considered Saturn to be more akin to Ketu than Mars is because both Saturn and Ketu are associated with ascetism. I'm just not able to reconcile the qualities of Ketu with fiery, aggressive Martian energy. That said, it would be helpful to understand why the classical scholars made that association. I'm not one for taking things "as read", I have to understand the underlying principle :-)

Magha is said to have a fiery quality, similar to Krittika, known for its association with cutting and knives. The association is with Mars, or some earlier blacksmith-like god.

I'm sorry, is that last sentence refering to Magha or Krittika? I ask because every reference to Magha that I've read online points to the sense of nobility and insistence on deference and respect. It's symbol is the Palanquin, or royal seat. The qualities sound quite Sun-like, yet the ruler is Ketu. Very confusing!

Uttara Phalguni is associated with courage, stamina, and masculine physical strength, clearly Martian qualities. This shows up often with males who have an UP Moon or Ascendent. I agree that this may prove Ketu's strength in Leo.

Again, all the online references I've looked at associate Uttara Phalguni with the Sun and not Mars. I'm not taking issue with you SD, but I'm wondering where you get the Mars association from?

Rahu does have "monk" like qualities, but not in Aquarius (this is where I needed my notes, I simply don't have all of this memorized yet). It shows up in Ardra, the central nakshatra of Gemini. Ardra is research oriented with a probing intellect. It spends a lot of time making careful, penetrating observations. Albert Einstein had an Ardra Moon. The association with "air travel" or anything to do with the heavens is how Rahu manifests here.

I can see unconventional and reclusive tendencies in all of the nakshatras ruled by Rahu. Both Swati and Shatabishak are interested in scientific or philosophical subjects and can be secretive.

Braha cautions over and over in his books, "don't mix and match the systems", because it doesn't work. This is wise advice.

It is indeed! I'll try not to fall into that trap again :-)

If no body of knowledge regarding strength or exaltation of Ketu was widely disseminated in India, there are two possibilities, as I see it. Either the tradition was lost, and may still yet resurface. Or there was no tradition of strength or exaltation for Ketu because the sages looked carefully for it and did not see it.

In that regard it would be interesting to discover the source for Bonatti's statement that Ketu is exalted in Sagittarius.

Cheers,
Pete

I AM getting bored at work. Shoulda known you two would get together.

Papretis, those are some pretty juicy bios you've got there, especially the one on Luisa Tetrazzini. Maybe it was her Ketu in Sag that made her such a princess (I know, no reference from the nakshatras backs it up). Some of your sample size has Ketu in Ardra instead of Rahu, or no mention of Rahu at all, but we'll let that go.

Pete, you're a smartypants, too, but that's okay, I like both of you. Sorry, the reference to Magha and Krittika wasn't that clear. "Fiery" means proud in this case, I'm pretty sure. Its something these two nakshatras share.

No doubt, UP is associated with the Sun, since the Sun sets up its dasas. Now its my turn to mix in a little imagination. Perhaps masculine sexuality and energy play a role in all three of the Leo nakshatras - Magha, PP, and UP. I tend to see this more as Mars than the Sun, although you could argue for the Sun. Magha wants children to strengthen its lineage - its all about patrimony. PP is where Mars and Venus hook up in a plush daybed (seduction is emphasized - Venus dominates). And UP is where they get married (Shiva and Shakti were married under this asterism). UP is protective, controlling, and stubborn, and wants to alleviate others suffering (Mars has been married a little while and means well, but wants his turn to dominate).

I know very little about classical Western astrology - I admit this. All I know about Bonatti is that he ends up in one of Hell's inner circles in Dante's Inferno (prehaps for being a smartmouth). But I guess he just borrowed hearsay secondhand like everybody else. Ketu in Mula (the first part of Sag) makes total sense exalted, now that I think of it. Mula is the most spaced out and far-to-the-future seeing of nakshatras. There is also the association of unhappiness and disappointment, which a prominent Ketu seems to suggest.

An exalted Ketu in Purva Ashada (the second half of Sag) makes no sense at all. PA is the "early unconquered" -the lucky ones who get everything the ancients thought important very early in life - honors, children, pretty wife, keys to the house - you name it. My ex has his Moon there, and yes, Venus gives him everything. Think of her spoiled little son-prince Cupid - that's PA. No real Ketu association there.

Yes, there is a lot of Greek thought in the Vedic system (my blending of Greek myths with the nakshatras shows how intertwined they are now). Its from a much later period, though. When that dude on the elephant made it into India, Hindu sculpture went Greek along with a lot of other things. But this was something like 2000 years after the Mahabarata - your Swedish sage isn't talking actual dates.

Now, don't get too upset with me. Maybe I was a little snide. But I can be charming, too. I've got that daybed thing down when it pleases me.

It is associated with a striking, intense gaze, or light-colored eyes that appear to radiate light. Those eyes showed up in some of the photos that were posted earlier, although not in others. One of the most vivid examples is the model Tyra Banks, who goes out of her way to wear light sparkling eyeshadow around her cat's eyes. She has Ketu very close to the Ascendent.

GR, its a good article, and its probably accurate for the dates of the height of Greek civilization, but it doesn't come close to grasping the scene a thousand or two thousand years earlier. But the author himself admits that, and says in so many words that the true influence of Hindu thought is beyond his scope.

I have a very simple translation of the nakshatras - one sentence each. No delineation, just bare prediction (very characteristic of core jyotish. I want to say it is around 1600 BCE, but it could be a lot older. How do we know? It talks about a lost 28th nakshatra that the sages had to get rid of in order to make the system work mathematically. It never would have come to light at all had it not been part of a larger literary work that somebody funded a translation on. There is no Greek influence in it. The existence of documents like this casts serious doubt on a premise that astrology got started in Mesopotamia. If you know of comparable Mesopotanian documents from a period before 1500 BCE, let me know.

I'll look for it at home and see if I can post it.

Sunny Dawn wrote: I have a very simple translation of the nakshatras - one sentence each. No delineation, just bare prediction (very characteristic of core jyotish. I want to say it is around 1600 BCE, but it could be a lot older.

That would be a remarkable document in and of itself, considering there aren't any of the Mahabharta from before 500 BCE, or the Rg Veda from before 900 BCE, though that it considered to be wandering around in a oral form from the middle of the second millenium BCE.

Sunny Dawn wrote: How do we know? It talks about a lost 28th nakshatra that the sages had to get rid of in order to make the system work mathematically. It never would have come to light at all had it not been part of a larger literary work that somebody funded a translation on. There is no Greek influence in it. The existence of documents like this casts serious doubt on a premise that astrology got started in Mesopotamia. If you know of comparable Mesopotanian documents from a period before 1500 BCE, let me know.

Existence being the key word here. It sounds, frankly, like more of the usual Hindi nationalist pabulum. While there are pre-horoscopic astrological/astronomical teachings in many cultures, we also can't just jumble them all together and say they are equivalent to, or that they are in fact, horoscopic astrology. We also can't take some pandit's or scholar's fairy story about astrology coming from Atlantis or Mu as a given, when it is most certainly not. While it may hurt our pride to be critical, we should stick to the verifiable facts and not allow ourselves to be deluded into fanciful notions; that can only serve to damage our understanding, especially astrological understanding as judgment is vital to its exercise.

Fancy language, GR. You sound so offended. Can't you give me a chance to go home and find it, and see what the larger document was? Or are you just mad because your Western-centric worldview might get kicked off its pedastil?

Sunny Dawn wrote:Fancy language, GR. You sound so offended.

Well, I'm not particularly offended.

Sunny Dawn wrote:Can't you give me a chance to go home and find it, and see what the larger document was?

If you have a 3500 year old Sanskrit document at home, worrying what goes on a website? Probably not that important.

Or are you just mad because your Western-centric worldview might get kicked off its pedastil?

All I care about is facts. The fact is, right now, based on the available evidence, the Greeks, or Hellenized Egyptians or whatever is comfortable, devised horoscopic astrology, with what appears to be a bunch of stuff from the Mesopotamians. Their work gets spread around, and into the East, where it gets altered, tinkered with, and adapted with either native materials or other innovations. Then, as the Caliphate rises, they bring together astrological information from India, Persia, and the Greeks. Then they make their own alterations, tinkerings, and adaptations, and so on to Europe, where they decide in the Renaisance that they know better then anyone, and then proceeded to screw it all up. A dramatic and misleading simplification, but it gets the jist of it.

There are other pre-horoscopic astrological texts, and probably some oral traditions before that, in a lot of ancient cultures. The stuff about the moon mansions is part of it, as far as I know.

This is how the matter stands. Now, as time goes on and more sources become available, that can change, but its not really challengeable with the evidence at hand.

I like the idea of Gabe?s History of Astrology in A Paragraph, but it probably says something about how speculative this subject is when she can reduce it down to one paragraph and I still want to take issue over some of it.

That aside, I wonder if the disputed dates of Indian astrological documents is connected to a reluctance to contradict the content of those ancient documents. Perhaps this is tied to the traditionally devotional attitude towards those texts, so that the claims haven't been as widely subjected to updated historical knowledge as western texts have?

All ancient civilisations exaggerated their own histories, partly because they had little concept of how huge figures of numbers related to the evolution of mankind over time. The Babylonian Berosus claimed that he had access to temple records going back more than 500,000 years. He probably just thought of a great big number and doubled it. No one doubted his word because they had no way to measure it against proven details. Hence Pliny also claimed that the Babylonians had cuneiform tablets with astronomical observations for 730,000 years. (He added a few more to 'big' it up a bit). Then we have the Indian textbook Surya Siddhanta purporting to be based on records kept for over two million years. To put this into perspective: human language developed in the upper Palaeolithic period, and our earliest known cave paintings date to around 30-25,000 BC.

One thing we can rely on, is that we can?t rely on the historical information contained within these ancient texts. Often these figures are no more than civilisations attempting to compete with each other over who has had the most sacred knowledge longest. As far as I am aware, historians are in agreement that the Venus Tablets of Ammisaduqa from ancient Babylon are the oldest preserved records to demonstrate astrology being practiced with applied organisation and logic, based upon systematic planetary evaluation, and it is partly for this reason that Mesopotamia is so important to the ancient origins of Western astrology. These were written around 1600 BC based upon observations that began at an earlier, unknown date. There is, of course, some very important earlier scattered evidence, from Mesopotamia and elsewhere, suggesting that these kinds of records are based on much older traditions, but if we are talking about documents of planetary information, and then circulated texts, the Mesopotamians still have a clear claim to the oldest preserved knowledge. I will be very happy to hear of credible evidence to the contrary.

Then they make their own alterations, tinkerings, and adaptations, and so on to Europe, where they decide in the Renaissance that they know better than anyone, and then proceeded to screw it all up.

Actually, this should read:

Then they make their own alterations, tinkerings, and adaptations, and so on to Europe, where they decide in the Renaissance that they know better than anyone (which, of course, they did, because they'd finally got it right), and then proceeded to screw it all up (largely because of the tragic influence of the Theosophical Society).

Sunny Dawn wrote:Papretis, those are some pretty juicy bios you've got there, especially the one on Luisa Tetrazzini. Maybe it was her Ketu in Sag that made her such a princess (I know, no reference from the nakshatras backs it up). Some of your sample size has Ketu in Ardra instead of Rahu, or no mention of Rahu at all, but we'll let that go.

Hmmm... the idea was not to have Rahu or Ketu or any specific planet there, just charts with emphasis on Ardra. To have three planet (out of the nine used in Indian astrology) in one nakshatra is not very common; those 67 charts were drawn out from 10154 charts, they were the only ones that had three or four planets in Ardra. So in that way it's possible to try to find common themes in those 67 charts and maybe draw some conclusions, regardless what else those charts contain.

I would never associate Ketu in Sag with being a princess . Maybe you're thinking about tropical Sagittarius here. That's not wise when we're floating around a sidereal zodiac. That's, eh... mixing of two systems. You may be interested in what B.V. Raman writes about sidereal Sagittarius in How to Judge a Horoscope:

They are too conventional and also business-like. They are prompt and hold conservative views. (---) They are too callous and enthusiastic. They hate all external show. They are God-fearing, honest, humble and free from hypocrisy. They exercise strinct control over their food and drinks and in regard to their relations with the opposite sex.

Luiza Tetrazzini (28th June 1871 at 3.10 AM +0.00 in Florence, Italy, rating AA) had Ketu/Saturn conjunction in her 7th house, the house that signifies everything that's opposing us. In traditional Western astrology it signifies both open enemies and partners. It's everything that's foreign to us, that repels us and attracts at the same time. Ascetism (Ketu + Saturn in sidereal Sag) was foreign for Tetrazzini. She embodied everything but that.

Andrew wrote: Then they make their own alterations, tinkerings, and adaptations, and so on to Europe, where they decide in the Renaissance that they know better than anyone (which, of course, they did, because they'd finally got it right), and then proceeded to screw it all up (largely because of the tragic influence of the Theosophical Society).

My argument against that bolded phrase would be that, by assuming that Ptolemy was the source and main document of horoscopic astrology (which is clearly not the case), the Renaissance astrologers ended up damaging their astrological knowledge and judgment in their attempts to reform astrology. Not everything that was done is this period is bad, as examination of what Lilly and Morin did shows, but I'd argue that most of it was, and this made it that much easier to disregard astrology altogether. Then as consequence, the 19th century manifestation also found it much easier to mold what was left of astrology into something more appealing to the philosophical and political doctrines of that time, e.g. the Theosophical inspired musings of Leo, Rudhyar, et al.