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Hello and welcome back to New Books and India Studies. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Spalkron. And today I have the pleasure of speaking with Martin Ganssen of Lund University on a really exciting new translation, the Jewel of Annual Astrology.
Hello, Martin, and welcome to the podcast. Thank you. So there's so much to dive into in terms of this work and its implications for inter-studies, our understanding of all things, Indic. But first maybe tell us a little bit about how you got interested in this line of research.
Oh, yeah. That's a very long story. Okay. I think we're all so fine.
I've been interested in, on personal level, I've been interested in both things, Indian and things astrological since childhood, really. Since long before I took up my academic career. So once I'd done my, um, Indological Studies and was considering what to do with those, I decided to switch to, or to add history of religions to that. And maybe get a chance of actually getting a job at some point.
And so I focused on Indian religions. And then when was time to do my PhD thesis, I am, I thought, why not combine these two interests? And so I wrote my dissertation on a form of South Indian astrology or semi astrological divination called Nadi reading. And I just sort of continued working on divination and astrology ever since.
Wait, you did a dissertation on Nadi Jotisha? Yeah. Wow. It's, you know, as esoteric as Jotisha is among, you know, the collars or the videos or whatever you want to call it, non-Nadi Jotisha is like most esoteric French within the world of Gopisha, no one understands Nadi.
So I have to ask you now, what did you, how did you, how did you, how did you, how did you, how did that go? What did you find out? Well, okay. So, so very briefly, Nadi is a word mostly used in South India, right?
And you get basically two types of Nadi texts. You get the Tamil ones and the Sanskrit ones. So if you go to a Nadi reader in South India to get an actual reading, those will almost always be the, the Tamil language ones. And the people who do these readings are typically not astrologers as such or they're not very knowledgeable about astrology.
So that's not the type of text that I, I worked with. I did visit a number of those Nadi readers and got some readings and I, I put that into the ethnographic section. Really my, my dissertation had two separate parts you can say it's an ethnographic description of, excuse me, of, well, traveling around South India and getting Nadi readings. But then for the, the actual textual study, I got hold of some texts in Sanskrit, if you can call it that it was pretty bad Sanskrit.
They were astrological texts, astrological Nadi texts in Guru Nadi, the Ruhanadi, oni-shanadi. I think those were the main three ones that I worked with. So I got copies of manuscripts that I think were originally in the governmental rental manuscripts library in Madras of Chennai. It's a long time since I did this, but I think that was the case.
So I got copies of those. Sorry. No, no, it's fine. It's part of the reason for those of you listening to why it's so fascinating to me is that let me share an experience with Nadi Jyothi Shilen, and you'll get a better stuff.
The first time I went to India in this life in Nihal, in 2009, of course, it was quite surreal coming, you know, having an sort of Hindu-Vainese background and having apparently very Indian samskaras, much as yourself. I went and of course I was mystified that I didn't experience any culture shock. It just, it was just, it was just, I was like, okay, it's cool. I get this somehow.
But I went after, what did I, what was I doing then? Oh, I was doing a research trip, a chain studies research trip. I went to a lecture which I had a week or two to just, you know, be in India. And Nadi reader was recommended to me in the city of Pune.
And so I'll just narrate for those of you listening what I've experienced and you can draw your own conclusions and then Martin, you can maybe comment upon whether it conforms with your own research or your own traipsing about, so it's not a research. So I joke that she's obviously astrologer, but I'm not, I don't think she, it's very different in that you don't give them, in my experience, you don't give them your birth time or any information about you. So you go to this reader and he takes your thumbprint. And apparently this is an ancient practice.
This is like a, you know, sort of a CSI crime scene kind of thing. It takes your thumbprint. Apparently there are other methods whereby he will locate your record. Yes, you heard your record, your leaf upon which your destiny is inscribed.
It takes, he took my thumbprint. He came back with a bundle of sort of leaves that looked, you know, ancient. Probably need to be copied over periodically for the sake of preservation. And then he says, just answer yes or no.
So he picks up a leaf and he's literally reading. I mean, reading words, not nothing symbolic. He's reading and it'll be such that you have three sisters. No, okay, this is a nurse.
You have one sister. Yes, your parents are still together. Yes, you are in engineering. No, okay, this is a nurse.
And then he went to, he went maybe through close to 10 of them, I'd say. And then things such as you have a sister, yes, you're still completing your completing your education. Yes, your parents live together. Yes, you are in a country that's different from the country of your birth.
Yes. And then at the very end, your mother's name is so and so. Yes, your father's name is so and so. Yes, now that here is on the back of my neck or standing up.
Your name is Raj. Raj something Raj something Raj Vinduraj, your name is Raj. Yes. Oh, he says this is yours.
That's just the Angus bush, right? That's just the appetizer. And then he proceeds to read about a score, a dozen to a score factoids about your life of the path. And they're astonishingly accurate.
And then proceeds to tell a couple things yet to come. And then who knows? And time will tell, as they say. Some of those things have come to pass and either others haven't or will not.
Who knows? In this mode, I don't know how to make sense of it. I'm just relaying to my experience. And so then he prescribes a couple of things that I should do for comic remediation.
And and then he asks, you know, do you want there's a chapter for you in terms of karmic antecedents? Like, do you want to understand some of your main suffering in his life? And why? Like what the reason was?
And I'm like, well, I've come this far. Why don't you say no? Sure. Sure.
Why not? We've already gone on the rabbit hole. The clocks are melting. Why not?
So he says, I won't go into the specifics, but he indicated he sketched out a past life, a narrative which he says was a past life. And I had this series of epiphanies where, you know, the same way when you read actual narrative and you realize things, whether he was actually sketching out a past life or not. E-respect of the story he told was profoundly meaningful as as a narratological sort of karmic antecedent to the situation I was in and some of the core, you know, sort of brutal experiences I was having, the core suffering I was having, it made so much sense, astonishing this man, you're nothing about me, never met me before. I did my name.
I just literally booked an appointment and showed up. And that's an experience you file away on the days when when academics actually think that reason will save them. You understand reality, you just compartmentalize that like a traumatic memory that you can't process and you don't think about it. On the days when, on the days when we honor the hubris of the rational impulse, we accept that there are things that we cannot explain.
There's data that we just don't know how to process or understand. We marvel and wonder at what the hell just happened to me. Anyhow, I digress, please tell our audience whether this is at all unique or what is your experience of naughty readings. I don't know what you're relating to is a very typical sort of experience.
I mean, I've not had the best of luck with naughty readings. I know quite a few people who have had naughty readings. And like you said, maybe 10 or 12 leaves have been read through or not read entirely through, but I've been sort of examined briefly before the reader hit upon the right one. In my case, usually they had to go through 50 to 100 leaves and in some cases they said, no, sorry, your leaf isn't here.
And in other cases, they claim to have founded but by that time I would have given them just by answering yes or no, I would have given them so much information that they could more or less stitch something together. So but I have had one or two readings of the type that you relate, where my leaf has been found fairly quickly and some information about the past, including names, has been given in a way that I can't really explain. But I'll tell you what happened in Sweden, the system has when you do a PhD, you write your thesis, it's published and then it's publicly defended. So there's a public debate.
I know this is not necessarily the case in all countries, but in Sweden there's this sort of ritual debate between the person defending his thesis and an opponent appointed by the faculty and its public. So the opponent in my case was a professor of Indology, Western born professor of Indology, who at the time when he was reading through my thesis in preparation for this debate was actually in South India. So he decided, well, I should go for some nadi readings and get the experience for myself. They did.
And the first place he went to was obviously fake. But in the second place, he related this publicly after discussing the various chapters of my thesis and he started relating this in front of the audience. And he said, in this place, after a few leaves have been gone through, the reader started giving these names from the leaf. And as I said, this was a Western born professor.
So it started out, and his wife was Indian. So it started out by saying your wife's name is so-and-so Indian name, which was correct. I was impressive in itself, but then it says your mother's name is, and he gave a Western name, which is even more impressive perhaps in Indian context. And then he said, the reader said, and your father's name is, it's, it's, and he said, I can't read this.
Do read Tamil. So this professor said, yes, I do. Well, look at this and he showed him the leaf. So from here to here, it's not your father's name.
It was a very unusual Dutch name, first name, and it was correct. It was the name of his father. And he actually saw it written on the leaf. So it was that.
So the final question that he asked me on this day when I was defending my thesis was, what's going on here? So that I think is a fairly typical response. That's an incredible story. I mean, incredible is probably the best word to use for this whole branch of jothisha.
Incredible, it's believable. It's, you know, cynically it's not to be, you know, it's not to be believed. But how does one explain away, you know, this is my experience, your experience, your advisor's experience, the experience of half a dozen people I've talked to. That's how I knew it.
Not that the show was playing. And you know, for me, I'm of the opinion that the paranormal or the occult, one of the greatest failings in modernity and especially religious studies is people don't think critically about it. People think, well, you know, it's all mumbo jumbo astrology, apparitions, they put them all into the same category of phenomena. I just stuff that it makes no sense and therefore is nonsense.
And really think critically, you know, I've met people with astonishing mental abilities. I've met people who could literally read my mind. Three, in fact, literally. I mean, sometimes verbatim.
See, that doesn't, for me, that I've had that experience and I can imagine that perhaps some are congenitally gifted or undergo a profound transformation of consciousness, whatever the case is, that I could swallow because I've been around such incredibly intuitive people. That's a different phenomenon than your destiny was recorded centuries before your birth on a leaf in South India, for a second. You know, that's a very different, that has different implications. I don't think critically about these things.
They dismiss them all wholesale. But that's a very different thing. You know, that has very different implications about free will as opposed to implications about the powers of the mind. And this is sort of the ideas that I was playing with after this experience.
You know, how much of this is scripted and like, am I able to do anything? You don't dwell that too much because then you don't decide to apply for PhD programs or podcasts or what have you. But anyhow, I thank you so much for sharing the story of your professor especially because these people are literally reading, you know, they're reading, the reading things that were written about your destiny, including names. In mind, what was astonishing to me was my actual birth chart was on my leaf.
The man, he recreated with no data from me. He recreated the portrait of the heavens at the time of my birth. And I'm thinking, why is, then I'm thinking, well, I don't understand because I didn't think this was astrological in the sense of looking at the stars and the nachshatras. I didn't think it was operating under that mechanism because this is just okay.
Maybe the narrative is such that there's a Rishi who was able to see destiny. So let's just say this is a narrative. That's very different from, you know, we have the stars and the signs and the constellations and now we have to interpret that. Apparently in this system, they're part and parcel of the same.
And this is what I mean, like when you think critically about what's happening, you really had a loss to understand the mechanism or the understood mechanism at work there, if that makes any sense. I should point out perhaps that if you talk to people in India, not Nadi readers, but people who know about astrology and professional strangers and so on, about Nadi readers and Nadi readings, you will get some differences of opinion. One thing that you often hear and that certainly has been my experience as well, is that even the ones that give you names and things like that very correctly, the predictions tend not to be fulfilled. And they tend to be very stereotypical.
Like if you do this bhuja, if you or if you pay me, that is pay the reader to do this bhuja on your behalf, then everything will be good. All kinds of amazing good fortune will be good. If you don't, then everything will be terrible. The planets are out to get you, they will ask Karamayasad to get you.
And it's very black and white. But usually these predictions tend not to come true, the good ones are the bad ones. That's what I've heard from many people. So what some professional astrologers have told me in India is that they have this idea that the Nadi readers are not actually doing astrology, they're putting that predictions into astrological terminology.
But they actually have some sort of breitasidhi that they got mastery over a ghost, some sort of spirit who is whispering things in their ear. And the spirits know about the past, but they can't predict the future. And that is why they can give correct details about what has already happened, but their predictions will fail. So this is a theme that I've had repeated many times in India.
So one quick point, in my case, it is the case that everything that was read from the belief which he transcribed from actually having a notebook somewhere in Tamil, which I don't know. Everything that was transcribed was 100% accurate. No question. Mine is my chart.
But this is a thing. But let's just assume it's possible that one's destiny can be known in advance and recorded in a family who collects destinies. This is what I assume that's the case. Now that's very different from whatever that individual is saying now, whether through contrivance or disbreathesity or what divination, what that individual is saying, whether he's a corrupt priest who just wants to manipulate you, that's different from him being the inheritor of this whatever you want to call this, this destiny leaf.
So there are different pieces at play. No, I loved that one. I had one reading and the man had integrity and man, there was no pressure. It was basically a donate whatever I wanted for the reading.
And that's how I knew that he was an after. I'm visual. Well, what can I say? Glory to the gods.
I found a naughty reader with integrity. But see, the level of the person's weakness as a personality or bench or conditioning is very different from God knows where they got this leaf from. This is mystifying to me. Ironically, it's not mystifying to me for someone to have an occult attainment and be able to know things.
I've seen this a number of times in my life. I've also seen a number of charlatans. I've seen this done, my guru had this ability day in and day out. It was never part of tricks.
But he knew what you're thinking. He more often than not knew what was around the corner for you. And this became, he redefined my understanding of what was possible. That I can understand the idea that there's a record in advance of one's destiny.
That's a different situation. We have fallen down the rabbit hole of Nadi. You never know. One never knows what's supposed to be the best.
But suffice it to say you've more than established your account for your interest in Scripture, in astrology. Your work is a translation which anyone's ever looked at, one verse of Sanskrit. This surprising you completed this translation in one lifetime. I mean, it's a great deal of work.
But tell us what this is a translation of. Okay. So it's a translation of the work written in 1649 or completed it in 1649 by a man named who was caught astrologer to Ashu Jai, who was the second son of the emperor Shah Jahan, and who was governor of the Mughal province of Bengal in eastern India. But obviously Shah Jai was a Mughal ruler, so he was a Muslim.
But I wonder what's a Brahmin? So it was a Brahmin astrologer at the court. And he wrote, well, he says that he wrote a number of works and we've no reason to disbelieve him, but the only two that survived to my knowledge is this one that I translated to high anatatma and a similar work that he wrote five years later, the whole anatatma. So both of these are what is known as Nibandas.
That is encyclopedic treatises on astrology. So first he wrote one on Sanskritized perse Arabic astrology, what is known as Bhagiga, and that is the work that I've translated. Then he wrote a similar one on what we might call classical Indian astrology, that is in the pre-Islamic Indian style, which has not been translated or edited critically to this point. So that's the book.
It's an Ybanda, which means, I said it's an encyclopedic treatise. What Nibanda is in more detail is it's sort of a book that tries to establish definitively the teachings or the conclusions, the established doctrines of a particular science or a particular shastra that is a branch of learning. Often by examining one or more fundamental texts and then trying to harmonize them, discussing and contradict each other, then discussing, can they be harmonized if not which one is correct and which is incorrect? So it's, and when it's called it a meta commentary.
So that I think is a fair description. If you're familiar with Sanskrit writings, you know that the commentary tradition in India is very important and very strong. So this is like a sort of meta commentary in that it's not a commentary on just one single text, but rather on a whole body of texts that form a shastra discipline. So let's think about this in terms of the world behind the text, the world within the text, the world in front of the text, or I.E.
this one that we're in now. Let's talk a little bit about the world behind the text insofar as this historical trajectory of the produced Tajikar. The Tajikar is sort of, you know, if I'm understanding correctly, this is sort of, you can think it's a third way for the third major innovation to Jothi Shara Indian astrology. Could you say a little bit about the trajectory of how Tajikar came into being?
All right. So what we think about as, well think of as Indian astrology has several components. So if we go quite far back into the Vedic period, horoscopic astrology, as we know it didn't exist in India, but there was astral divination on the sort. And the, especially the constellations that the moon or the asterisms that the moon passes through day by day, the nakshatas, playing an important part.
So the sun and the moon and the phases that the moon form with the sun and the asterisms that the moon passed through were used for things like determining the most suspicious or correct time for particular Vedic rituals and so forth. And eventually they were also used for personal divination. Horoscopic astrology, which is what most of us think about when we hear the term astrology, that is the zodiac with its 12 signs and the planets and the houses and the aspects. If we know anything about astrology, we recognize those terms.
That all came into India in a wave of transmission sometime in the early centuries of the common era. We don't know exactly when, but probably in the second, third, fourth century around that time. And was very quickly naturalized so that within just a few centuries, memories of this being a foreign system of knowledge seem to have vanished. It was the history of astrology was mythologized.
It was considered a shastra that had been passed down from the gods through the rishis to mankind. Then approximately a millennium after this first wave of transmission from the Hellenistic world, we get a second wave of transmission of astrology into India, this time from the Perso-Arabic world, which was occasioned obviously by the increased Muslim presence in India. Peaceful and not so peaceful. And this transmission of Perso-Arabic astronomy and astrology into India seems to have been mediated to quite some extent by the Jains, interestingly.
So it seems to have been transmitted by the Jains and by people belonging to the mercantile Jates or both groups that were composed of both Jains and Hindus to the extent that that distinction is meaningful. But in any case, it was sometime before it was then accepted and adopted and adapted by the Brahmins. So the Jains and the merchants seem to have been a sort of middleman between the Muslims and the Brahmins. I don't actually remember how you phrased your question, is that?
I'll say what I've said to many an interlocutor on this podcast. It's always about scenic route. In questions are always going to be generative and not inclusive. I was asking about laying the land, sending the scene in terms of the world, the text.
I imagine the listener, specialist generalist, educated, interested public or what have you. The ever since that Tajika is sort of an evolution of a Persian Arabic grafting into this, this, this, this un-scratic world of India. Right. And so we'll talk about the implications of that for the world in front of the text, perhaps towards the end of the podcast.
But now let's talk about the world within the text. I mean, what have you translated many of us? I mean, how, how, I guess the work, how, what is the structure, you know, tell us about the lay of the land. Okay.
Well, but as I said, he was a Brahmin. He wrote in Sanskrit. And he was, he was not working from texts in Persian or in Arabic, because he was writing, as I said, in the mid 17th century. By that time, Tajika astrology had been around in India for perhaps 400 years or so.
And he, he was working exclusively from Sanskrit texts. So by the time that he was writing, he was, he was working with Sanskrit texts, and he was writing for a Sanskrit literate audience. Specifically, he was writing for a Brahmin audience, male Brahmin Sanskritic audience, which means that he's, he's obviously presupposing that his readers know astrology, that is, that they know at least the basics of a pre-Islamic style astrology. But that Tajika, that is the, the Sanskritized, so Arabic style astrology is alien to them or is new to them.
So he, the structure of the work is such that he starts by, well, the very first chapter is, is really, it's partly about what we discussed, or what you mentioned, just not about fate and free will and so on. And the role is astrology meaningful, if everything is pretty salmon, why, what is the use of reading your horoscope and things like that. It's a general objections and defense of astrology. And then he goes into the question of whether it is permissible for a Brahmin to study this foreign science.
Is it not against the sort of, so he's, he mounts this defense of Tajika. And obviously his conclusion is that it is permissible, because otherwise he wouldn't be writing the book. So, but, but then after that introductory chapter, he starts explaining the, the fundamental concepts of personal Arabic astrology as he understands them. That are different, or that are not present in pre-Islamic Indian astrology.
So there are, there are a number of technical concepts and I'm not sure how far you want to go into those. I've, I have talked about this book on a couple of other podcasts, but they have been podcasts relating to the history of astrology. So this is, this is for a somewhat different kind of audience. So this is more from a religious studies point of view, right?
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Right. So, and also the audience is a really mixed bag of studies, scholars like Hindu studies, scholars interested people of, all kinds of interested parties whether they're studying or not. And so, so perhaps getting to technical, not too technical. Right.
But that's what he does. So he gets into the, the different, the various concepts that are unique to, to personal Arabic astrology as compared to Indian. and then he goes into detail, sometimes excruciating detail, about how to interpret an annual horoscope, because that is the, as the title suggests, that is the central focus of the work, how to cast an interpret an annual horoscope. And this was something new.
This is actually the main attraction for Balabhadana and for his readers. It's presented that way, that this is something really useful that we don't have in traditional Indian astrology. We have the annual horoscope here, because an annual horoscope, it simply means that every year on a person's birthday, or actually at the precise moment, when the sun returns to the exact place in the zodiac, which it held at birth. So not just on his birthday, but at the exact hour and minute when the sun is in the same position that it was at birth, you cast a new horoscope.
And that horoscope will be valued, the birth horoscope is valued for your whole life. But the annual horoscope will be an extra horoscope that is valued for just one year in life. So that will tell you in detail that you can't get from just from the birth horoscope. It will tell you what will happen during this year.
And you can subdivide the year and get very small units of time and make very precise predictions. Now, this practice, is it only for individuals or is it also for example, nations or events of string kinds? That's a very good question. There is actually in Arabic language astrology, there is a practice of casting annual horoscopes for the world.
But that is different, that is trying not to get too technical. It's done in a different way. It's based on different principles. So the practice that was transmitted to India and adopted enthusiastically by at least some Indian misplonges was only for individuals.
So it's a way of getting greater precision for individual forecasting. Yes, you can feel free to use technical terms or get technical to respond. It's typically my role to sort of mediate and enlarge your story. So that's final.
I'll be sure to render it accessible at what possible. It's just that this biology can get so very technical. Absolutely. That's another question we could talk about whether it's an art or a science or both.
But we'll talk about that after. So this work you translated is a treatise on the principles of Tajikha astrology meant for maybe practitioners of or those conversant in mainstream Indian astrology. Say that's fair. Yes.
And so perhaps, unlike for example, when you talk about the idea that horoscopes are not used by in India until some influx of influence of a weak thought. That's going to be problematic to a number of people for a number of reasons. But let's just assume that's the case. Certainly, the horoscope is to modern Hindu astrology as a Vedic sacrifice is to modern Hindu ritual.
And yet it seems to me that what you're saying or implying is that Tajikha still isn't quite as mainstream as a principle's adopted from the weak. That's right. I was going to say that there was never this forgetting of the foreign origins of Tajikha that we see with what you call mainstream Indian astrology. But actually, in the 20th century, we do get people like Vivi Raman, who was the perhaps the most important influence on Indian astrology in modern times and on the revival, if you will, of Indian astrology.
We get he was also very nationalist in his general attitude. And he planted refused to admit even that Tajikha had a non-Indian origin. He claimed that it was Indian to begin with. And then maybe the Arabs brought a few things and then we got them back.
But it was Indian originally. And sort of a Bumurang astrology. Actually, there is a sort of similar argument in Balabhadra's text. And it's interesting to see that in the earliest Tajikha texts in Sanskrit, which are from the late 13th, early 14th centuries, there's really no defense given for the study of Tajikha.
There are no arguments given why this is okay. It's permissible. But they just sort of dive into it and say, this is something interesting. And several other authors of the 16th and 17th centuries seem to have felt it necessary to give to make some apologetics to give arguments as to why it is permissible to study this.
So apparently, the resistance to foreign systems of knowledge increased with time. And so one of the arguments that are given in defense of the study of Tajikha is precisely that it was not exactly that was Indian to begin with, but that it was given by the Sun God. So there's this myth that says the Sun God for some reason, I don't think I've ever seen the exact reason discussed. But for some reason, the Sun God was cursed by Brahma Vishnu and Shiva together to be born as a human being in the land of the Mlechas, that is the foreigners.
So he was born, as I say, in the city of Rome. And he started teaching astrology, being the Sun God, you know, he was obviously new about astrology. He started teaching astrology to the Mlechas, the foreigners. And then that same astrology came to India.
So yes, it has it for an origin, but before that it had a defined origin. So it's okay. That's so much there that I may engage if this were in a podcast, but obviously, you know, a mythological dimension is fascinating to me. I just the second book that I just finished was about Sun myths and this may have a very interesting footnote.
Really fascinating myth of the Sun. And I mean, there's lots to be said, but let's not hold down the rabbit hole because we're already down the rabbit hole of your picture. So let's stay in this rabbit hole. So this work, actually, let's just take head on this idea of, look, this is Indian, this is not Indian, this is Indian, this was influenced by the British, this is influenced by the Greek.
You know, from my perspective, and this is just my perspective, you know, who will result in my training and sort of my experiences in life, you know, let's use an analogy. Where do cars come from? Who invented the car? Do we know?
I'm sure it's known. I personally don't know, but I'm sure someone does. Is it not America? I believe it's America.
Okay, who makes great cars? Only Americans? Do you see what I'm saying? Yes.
I'm saying this idea that somehow religion is bereft of the dynamism and the change that we experience day in and day out year and year out, that somehow influences don't, you know, the in terms of the world in front of the text, certainly horoscopes are like a cornerstone of in astrology. And there is a profound utility in using them, whether or not this was due to the influence of another culture, some of the centuries ago, does not all take away from the fact that this is Indian, Indian can be in terms of the present day, right? This idea that somehow there was this pristine India that emerged and that's authentic and everything that's deviated from that, this idea is problematic to say the least, right? Absolutely.
Should we not gauge the authenticity in terms of the result, rather than this imagined pristine first cause of all things you see, like, so I don't really understand if if if if if curry was discovered in another continent and brought to India, should we now say that curry is on Indian? Absolutely. And as a matter of fact, most I would say most of the dishes that that at least in North India, that people that Western is typically associated with North Indian cuisine are actually Mulgal style dishes or or evolved out of them. I know I read at some point, this is not at all my my area of expertise, but someone someone at some point, I think, wrote something called or something along the lines of King Nalas cookbook, you know, trying to figure out what food was like in India before.
I don't even know where the historical line was drawn, but in ancient India. So absolutely Indian astrology today is very Indian irrespective of where the influences came from. And the problem here is that nationalism, political considerations come into play and have done so well since colonial times for very obvious reasons. And political considerations always tend to obscure scholarly, scholarly debate and investigations.
Now scholars in general, academic scholars in general, aren't really interested in which kind of astrology is best, because to them all astrology is going back to what you said earlier, all astrology is mumbo jumbo. So it's just different styles of mumbo jumbo and the only interesting question to the from the purely academic point of view is tracing these ideas, the transmission. On the other hand, from the point of view of an Indian astrologer or of an astrologer anywhere, the question is which astrology works best? But then of course there is this idea that, well, if Indian astrology works best, then you know, it's we're not going to have people other than Indians taking credit for that.
So this is where the question becomes sure affected. It's sort of like, you know, you have fertile soil of India. And if, you know, if mangoes grow there and the seeds are from a different continent, doesn't those mangoes aren't Indian? I mean, at the same time, you know, obviously, I'm not interested in being an ideologue or revolutionary or obviously interested in ideas, I'm interested in people, interested in culture.
You know, so it's fascinating. And I understand that I completely understand and sympathize with the rub of, oh, there's another narrative of India's greatness coming from outside. I understand the sort of nerve that that hits. I also understand the need to, to, to, how should I say this, to claim your citizenship as part of the global village?
Like we, India has nothing to learn from other nations or cultures. It's a two way street, right? It's always been a two way street. And now we're realizing more, there's just more traffic along those lanes now, right?
But it's always been a two way street in every civilization, in terms of interest, outside and what they've been able to export as well. So the world in front of the text, you have Indian astrologers who would cast horoscopes, so you would go to a show this year, you'd be like, I've been having a really, really rough year, you know, can you help me? And he may say, look, it's a global pandemic. What do you want from me?
Or, you're like, you don't understand, yes, it had the pandemic, but this has happened, this has happened, and okay, you know, they would take your birth information, they would cast a chart of the moment of your birth. And upon that chart, and for the house significations, the ontologies, significations overlaid on that would also be the ancient Vedic nachatra system. And that would be woven into the predictions and the diagnostics of the Jyotishi. And if they were so inclined or so trained, they may use some Tajikubin skills, such as, wait a minute, you're saying things really suck this year for you, Mark.
So let's do a chart of your precise solar return. And from the chart of your solar return, we can we can view more closely the karmic of this year. Now, if I'm off my rocker, I probably am, but that's a different story. But if I'm not getting what you're saying, this is how it works.
Yes, absolutely. And I would add though that prior to the 20th century, probably definitely prior to the 19th, even even astrologers who had mastered both mainstream or classical Indian astrology and Tajikah would not mix the systems. Typically, they might possibly, I don't know, they might, for a given client cast his chance, according to both systems. But they would still keep them separate.
And it's only in quite recent times over the past century or say 120 or 30 years, that all different styles of Indian astrology have begun to be mixed together and including mixing Tajikah with classical Indian astrology. And this is a result of, well, there's a bigger question here about astrology in India as its practice today versus how it was practiced, say two or 300 years ago, because it used to be the case that astrology was practiced by people belonging to families of astrologers. So it ran in families. And these families would guard the knowledge of astrology as their intellectual property, you might say.
Now, today, if you go to, if you try to find an astrologer in India, and they're not hard to find, but chances are he or she, first of all, there are many women astrologers in India today. That's one difference. But very likely he or she will not be a member of one of these traditional Jewish families. And most probably will not be a full-time astrologer either.
Many practicing astrologers have other day jobs and they do astrology on the side. And many of them do not read Sanskrit very well, but rely on translations and very often on English language translations. So even the astrologers read the classical works on Indian astrology in English, or sometimes in other monoculars like India and so on. But what happened to cause this change was basically astrology was on a downward trajectory in India for a long time and then had a revival around the turn of the last century as a direct result of the interest of Westerners, Americans and Europeans, namely those belonging to the Theosophical Society who set up their headquarters in South India and who were very interested in astrology and wanted to learn about Indian astrology and managed to get some pundits to translate some of the texts.
And in conjunction with the fact that printing presses were being established and that the railway was being built and expanded so that books and magazines could be transported over large areas. This led to a flourishing of translations, publications of astrological classics and even journals and magazines. So the text that for many many generations had been available only to certain families were suddenly available to anyone who could pay a few rupees to buy them and you didn't even have to know Sanskrit. They were available in the vernacular, including English.
So you get a whole new class of astrologers in India during the 20th century, increasingly so as the century progresses. So hobby astrologers, amateur astrologers and they're not at all that particular about keeping things pure or traditional and they pick and mix. So that's one reason why Tajikat and non-Dajikat Indian astrology today is very much mixed in practice, which they used not to be. So then just to sort of use an analogy, you know, there may be schools of thought where yes, we can have Persian dishes but we have the Persian dishes and we have the dishes versus there's a buffet, a bit of this, a bit of this, on the same plate, and we hope you don't get an suggestion.
No, that's very interesting. There's a lot that's very interesting. You know, by the time I met, you know, my teacher was, you know, I trained with him the last 12 years of his life and he had given up Chautisha, but Chautisha, like he was absolutely masterful, masterful, stunningly so perfect accuracy with predictions, like sort of Gandalfian, you know, Yoda asked master, you know, it was incredible and what was so profound was the way in which in the blinking of an eye he understands something about someone and use the idiom of Chautisha to communicate it, whether or not Chautisha was the mechanism whereby he understood nothing, who knows. But it was it was staggering such that, you know, he had your attainment to see and to know certain things about people, events to come.
This isn't even a witness is there in and over years. But what was interesting to me was he had your thing to understand into someone's astrological constitution. This mystifies me because then it implies, I don't know what the implications are for how much of this is objective versus subjective, but for example, he could know someone's chart just by being in their presence. I mean, I've seen this.
I mean, one of my first experiences was maybe a month or two after I met him, sitting at the table, having a traditional Indian meal pizza, having pizza after one of his talks, his sons at the Yoga Studio, whereby I met him, I joke that I met my traditional esoteric Indian group at Yoga Studio through studying Hinduism at the University of Toronto. This is how I make this magical man. So he's sitting there and you know, one of another student of his he had been teaching for some time, she was, she was, she was studying with him for some time. And also she was the owner of the Yoga Studio where he gave these these talks, he said, he said, and we're just sitting there and, and he says, and she's learning about nakchaturas, right?
The L'Ou rastarism. And she says to him, so it's just me, it's Kita, the owner of the studio myself in Mantraji, of course, having pizza, traditional Indian meal, in a local eatery. And she says, because he's trying to associate sort of the idea of nakchatura as a personality, right? The traits, they're supposed to be confortative.
Yeah. He says, so you know, what's Rajas nakchatura? And Mantraji says, my nakchatura. And I said, but Mantraji, you don't know my birthday.
Like I don't, I just mystified. And then when I saw it a number of times, I'm like, oh, he doesn't need the birthday. You know, he literally can see someone's chart. I was sitting there making a reference to my mother one day about whether or not she would stay in the job or leave.
And he just throws out something like, no, no, no, she'll stay in the job, people with moon in the 12th house. And then he just yammers on something from the Shostar about people with moon in the 12th house. And I'm thinking for myself, she's not even in this presence. I'm just referring to her and he knows her chart.
I don't even know her chart. So of course, what do I do? What do I do as the armchair, ethnographer that I am, I go and look at her chart and I'm like, Oh my God, she has moon in the 12th house. How on earth, like, how on earth could he know someone's astrological constitution?
Through like, you know, the quote unquote cosmic wireless, you know, these are things that you can't explain, you know, you can't rationally explain. And I think I think one is irresponsible to dismiss them as fancy or delusion. There's no short there's no shortage of fancy and delusion journalism on this earth, let's just get that clear. But certainly their experiences that are literally like they're super normal, right?
They're super natural. And more often than not, they have to do with these occult subjects like Jodisha. There's no question that I just sort of felt inspired to share some of Yeah, that's very interesting. We could we could go off on a tangent here and and and start critically analyzing these these ideas about what is rational and what is not rational and what is super normal or paranormal.
And because many of the sort of experiences that are often called paranormal and then dismissed because of that actually seem to be quite normal in the sense that many people have them. So I would say that whether or not it is rational to believe in them depends on your basic worldview. That is some some metaphysical presuppositions make things like astrology, for instance, or telepathy or different so-called paranormal phenomena quite rational, whereas other sorts of metaphysical presuppositions make them completely irrational. So basically if your if your fundamental presupposition is that's, I wouldn't even say scientific materialism, scientist materialism, ontological materialism is true.
And basically reality consists of matter, which is something non-conscious and so on. Then what you will have is a system that doesn't allow for things like cosmic parallels between the positions of the planets in the sky and events in a human life. So that's sort of believe astrological belief will become irrational. Now if you start out from a different kind of perspective from an idealist perspective, saying that consciousness is the basic stuff on which reality is built, then all of a sudden astrology is not that irrational anymore because you can argue at least that in an idealist, from an idealist point of view, things like metaphor or correspondences and symbolism should be at the root of our experience if everything is made of consciousness and these things are fundamental working subconsciousness.
But maybe we shouldn't go too far down that road either. I just wanted to say something about this word rational and supernormal. It seems to me sort of a double-edged sword in that it's a fallacy that astrology is called scientific. Obviously it's not in terms of the scientific method or something being demonstrable.
Certainly the principles aren't ultimately observable, like neither through microscope or telescope, but you can arrive at the would-be mechanics of this phenomenon. And I think it's also a fallacy to think that sort of scientific processes are what comprise human experience alone. Or that the human experience can be confined to, limited to, measured by the empirical. If only it was so simple, be great at programming, figure out ethics and virtue and meaning.
So much of what it means to be human is this, it's this tightrope walk, it's this navigation between the arts and the sciences between sort of inner and outer worlds. And astrology is peculiarly pitched between the two. On the one hand, there's extraordinary mathematics and scientific observation implicated. On the other hand, it's astrology is kind of the love child between engineering and terror reading.
Once you're, and so it's a fascinating topic. And I find it in India and in India culture for some strange reason, the most rational sort of successful professional in the western world. Although there's an unisrael joining me too. And there seems to be much less of a inclination to compartmentalize that certain things can't be understood, such as bhuja or julisha.
Whereas for a rest of your audience that would not be the case to you, either sort of you have a very different world view when you go see astrologer, or you don't go because it's it's it's it's folly. So you know, I'm curious to know what two things I'm curious about. This interesting project principle that this book is about the translations about. I mean, it's a poem, right?
What have you have you seen it? Have you tried it out? Like, have you ever seen this in action? Oh, now we're moving away from from my role as a scholar here.
Yeah. But the answer is yes. I mean, let me free it in a less personal way. Have you have are you aware of astrologers of Jupyashees using this principle?
It's still a common principle, modern julisha. I was saying all astrology, it's not when you say Jupyashees sense exclusively Indian, which it isn't. I mean, that's the whole point. Tajigheh is Indianized Arabic astrology and the the the Persians and the Arabs got it from Greek sources.
So as Greek language sources. So this is something that has been going around around and around. And annual forecasts are very much in use still, even even modern Western astrologers, some of them use them. They call them solo returns.
The older term would be annual revolution. But they were they've been used in in the Arabic language setting and in medieval and early modern Europe and they're still used by my Western astrologers, as well as my Indian ones. Just two quick technical questions. Well, I'm not too technical.
I'll leave those off for me. What do you forget we talked privately about this, but what is it the solo return from the for example, if someone was born, someone was in a different place where they were born. So the solo return, the chart of the solo return of wherever they are currently located. That's that's a big matter of debate among modern astrologers.
It's never discussed by the earliest source I've seen discuss it as more or less contemporaneous with Balabadarabar, but in Europe, it was a French astrologer Jean-Baptiste Morin, who wrote, well, actually it was a little earlier than Balabadarabar, but in the early 17th century, he wrote his own tone, was also a tone, the astrologer Galica, French astrology. And he's the earliest astrologer I've seen that advocates casting the chart not for the place of birth, that is the the annual horoscope, not for the place of birth, but for the place where the person happens to be at the time. Actually, among modern astrologers, there are at least three positions. Some people say use the birthplace.
Some people say use the place where the person is currently living, even if he or she happens to be somewhere else. And the third position is use the place where the person is actually present at the precise time. If you were born in Canada and you live in the UK, but on your birthday you're in your on holiday in Hawaii, then you get three different possibilities. That's really really interesting.
And then just one last sort of semi-technical question I want to touch on, because I think it'll allow some discussion or some thought about the differences between systems. So you mentioned that the principles also used in Western astrology or by Western astrologers. Does it make a difference then that the Indian system is said to you using the system? Yes.
I mean, is that accurate or no? That makes a huge difference, actually. A much bigger difference than between the tropical sidereal birth charts. This is a bit technical, but the question here is, Indians still use what is actually the slightly older version of the zodiac, which is fixed in relation to the stars in the sky.
Whereas Western astrology, since the Middle Ages, has favored a zodiac that is fixed in relation to the seasons. But that means they're not fixed in relation to the constellations, the stars in the sky. And the discrepancy between the two systems increases with time. So they're now almost a whole sign apart.
But if you get an Indian astrologer using the sidereal zodiac to cast your birth chart and you get a Western astrology using the tropical zodiac custom birth chart, they will still have the planets in the same houses. That is relative to the horizon. They will be in the same places. If you were born at sunrise, the sun will be on the ascendant in both horoscopes, right?
It will be in a different sign, maybe in your in your sidereal chart, you will have the sun in Pisces and in your tropical chart, you will have the sun in areas, but it will still be on the ascendant as it will be rising. So they're both similarities and differences between the two charts. But because the sidereal year, that is the time it takes the sun to complete one whole round with respect to the constellations, that year is slightly longer than the tropical year is about 20 minutes longer. That means that for every year of life, your annual revolution or your solar return will be 20 minutes displaced by 20 minutes.
So by the time you're in your mid 30s, there will be a 12-hour difference, unless I'm miscalculating that. I think that's right. Which means that there will be two completely different horoscopes, the solar return or annual revolution. They will not just be cast in different zodiacs, but they will actually be cast for different times.
One might be cast for five o'clock in the morning and the other will be cast for five o'clock in the afternoon. So they will be completely different. That is very interesting. We'll not pursue any of those technical events.
But those that will be more technically minded and or versed in Jotisha, I imagine you will derive some value from that response. Thank you. That was very well articulated for a fairly practical concept. What are you working on now?
What's next? Right. Well, this project took me rather longer than I had anticipated. So I've been working on this for more than five years.
Actually, I started about 10 years ago doing the first drafts of translations of some passages from so I really want to do something other than Tajikan right now. But I still want to do something relating to astrology. Now, I'm a historian of religion formally. That's the field I'm in.
I'm not an endologist as such. I did, I mean, I taught in ideology. I taught Sanskrit at university, but at my home university, there is no department of endologists. I'm a historian of religion.
And I specialize basically in two different types of studies. One is Indic religions, and the other is astrologian divination. So sometimes I combine the two, as I've done now, because I worked on astrology in an Indian setting. But what I really like to explore now is slightly outside the field of or partly outside the field of Hindu studies, because I'm very interested in the distinctions and the overlap, especially the overlap between the history of religion and the history of science, because science and religion are two very modern concepts, as they're used today.
And there's this clear distinction, even chasm, that we experience in modern Western culture, between science and religion. It's a very modern phenomenon. And that is touching on what you were talking about just a few minutes ago. That is one reason that many people really take offense at astrology and find it deeply uncomfortable, because it does have, how did you put it?
It's part engineering and part of tarot. I believe I can't reach open if the love child between the two. Actually, of course, it's the other way around. At the time when astrology flourished, this distinction had not yet come into practice.
It's the distinction that's modern, and then it's being projected onto an earlier knowledge system. And people become very uncomfortable about not being able to place astrology squarely in one or the other box. But those sort of phenomena interest me, so overlaps between science and religion. And astrology is one major area.
There are other such areas, but since this is what I've specialized in, I have some knowledge that is not that common and that it's taken me some time to accumulate. So I'd like to make the most of that. And the project that I have in mind, and I just need to get funding for it, but the project that I have in mind is to do with prognostication of longevity or lifespan. There's the idea that you can determine in advance how long a person will live.
And this is another major cultural taboo, of course, in the modern Western world. We don't want to talk about death or totality. We certainly don't want anyone to predict it for us. But if you've been to an Indian astrologer, I think you've probably experienced that it's one of the first things they want to talk about.
And if you don't want to hear their opinion about when you're going to die, you have to really almost shout it. Because it's very natural. And it used to be a very natural part of astrological consultations in Europe as well. And it goes all the way back to the earliest Greek language sources of astrology.
Let's say that the first thing an astrologer should do in casting a chart is to determine how long the person will live. Because if you don't know how long you have to live, you don't know whether it's meaningful to predict other things, such as will it get married, where they have children, what sort of job will they do? So this idea, this connection between astrology and lifespan prognostication is very old. And it ties in very much with other factors like medicine.
It was the ties between astrology and medicine were of course very strong, both in the ancient world and right up to the early modern period. So I'd like to explore that area about ideas about longevity and whether it's predictable or not, and how astrology relates to that. And I'd like to do that from an intercultural perspective. So looking at the oldest Greek language sources, but also at the easternmost and westernmost areas of transmission of those ideas, which means in practice India, on the one hand, and Latin Europe, on the other hand.
So that's the sort of thing I'd like to do. Well, that sounds fascinating. It sounds really interesting on a number of levels. We'll probably uncover a great deal historically about how people have thought about doing this, but implicitly or maybe exclusively, you're going to uncover so much about attitudes, world views, right?
It's those different ways of, we don't live in a world, we live in a world view, right? And the fallacy of thinking that science is meaningful, it's profoundly important to use all that meaningful, right? Meaning comes from our world view, right? And so I have noticed that actually that for Indians, one of the first questions they have is, well, how long do I have?
Around forever to have a long life that I can do what I want and pursue motion, the midlife or do I need to get serious now? That's a very difficult question. Isn't it? Wouldn't you want to know?
And for most westerners, it's all the achesickness and death, right? We have funeral homes, we have hospitals, right? We have all folks' homes, like you don't see corpses on the street ever unless you're giving me a call 911 and you need some couch time because it's jarring, obviously. But it's a very, very different attitude towards life and death.
Irrespective of whether or not one subscribes to belief in some sorry, belief in the divine or belief, irrespective of one's commitment, the practical way of life is very different when one sort of doesn't see this as their one bite at the apple and they're terrified that they're going to blink into oblivion and let's not talk about that. That's just too morbid, right? So obviously, there should be sufficient enough about Hindu thought that we can have you back on the program when you're back on the phone once you've completed that book. And if you want to know what you're going to complete, just cast a chart.
Exactly. Anything else you want to say about the book or anything in general before we close? Well, the main practical point to make is perhaps that it's freely available, since it was published open access, thanks to a generous contribution from the body funding the research itself. So it's available at the Brill website.
I mean, these days, some people know how to get more or less any book off the internet, but this time you can do it legally. I was interviewing, I believe, Joyce Flakinger, and she made the same observation towards the end of the interview. And she's so conscientious. She's like, well, you know, let's kind of omit that because you know, I'm like, no, you're just you're just stating the fact that this is done.
You're not reindorcing everyone knows this. And then when I presented it to sort of Marshall, the editor in chief of new books network, like, you know, maybe we should exercise that. He's like, you're getting me, we do a lot for publishers, that'll be fine. We do a lot for them.
Yeah, no, we're good. Yes. For those of you who used to getting free books without paying for them, now you can do it free. We have open access at the Brill website.
We have been talking about the jewel of annual astrology, an English translation of a fascinating Sanskrit work talking about Tajikha or Persian astrology, not practiced in India. And we've been talking with the books translator, Martin Gansden of Lund University. It's a pleasure speaking with you today. For those of you out there listening, keep listening, keep reading, and keep contemplating whether astrology is an art or a science or neither.
We're both. Take care.