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COVER STORY: ASTROLOGY
SCIENCE OR SHAM?
Even as stargazers claim their knowledge has an empirical
basis, scientists debunk it as mumbo-jumbo
By Ravi Shankar and Shuchi Sinha
Mankind has always
been in search of its destiny. So has the individual. Millennia ago, in
the Indian subcontinent, astronomers like Aryabhatta and Bhaskaracharya
raided the nightskies to try and unravel the meanings of planetary journeys.
Much later, a young Albert Einstein, not yet having crossed the Nobel
threshold, gazed upon the Milky Way one night and wondered about eternity.
And man's place in time. What he felt the most was humility: a mere human
trying to unlock the secrets of time and the future.
An old mystery, the heavens and the gods.
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FOCUS ON THE FUTURE: Sanyasini Debakanya
is a Tantra practitioner
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And an equally old controversy. That in the endless
universe which hosts the Milky Way travel nine planets that rule our lives,
act as agents provocateurs of our tragedies, the engineers of our triumphs.
It is the foundation of all astrology. And the study of its more respectable
cousin, astronomy.
Today, as Indian astrology is mired in controversy
over whether it is a science and whether it qualifies as a formal subject
for universities, scholars are attempting time travel to prove its authenticity
as a knowledge system. The answer, they say, lies in India's past. Oracles
have always been part of popular culture, from ancient India and Egypt,
to Greece and Rome. Kings and commoners alike were interested in their
future; the expectations of conquests and stratagems, or the fates of
harvests and livestock. From pre-Vedic times, there have been haruspices
or fortune tellers who read the entrails of fowls or foretold rain ending
a drought by looking at the shapes of the clouds. Most of these insights
were born of an animistic understanding of nature and human psychology.
But it is also in the nature of man to inquire, to ceaselessly collect
data and evolve formulae. As science kept changing its truths over the
centuries from the flat-earth, geo-centric age to the present one, the
heaven-watchers continued to pursue their old esoteric path. But it was
the future both sought to unravel-scientists and astrologers alike.
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FUTURE'S PAST: Astrologers at the Varanasi observatory
built by Raja Man Singh
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For the augurers of old, the future was the palatine
of the gods. And religion was closely aligned to the practice of rituals
and magic. The rationale of prediction depended more on the mystique of
faith with the practitioner turning into a medium of divine revelation.
The trend persists even today in places like eastern India where Tantra
is both religion and occult-both feared and revered. Sanyasini Debakanya,
a tantrik practitioner from Kolkata insists that tantrik astrology is
a science, inextricably linked to astronomy.
Even after scientific temper became the buzzword
of modernity, the old ways of prognostication remained. But traditional
Indian astrology relied heavily on birth charts calculated from planetary
positions and birth dates. Written in 1400 b.c., the Vedanga Jyotisha
is the mother of all Indian astronomical treatises. It refers to a surprisingly
accurate average of 366 days a year. Eclipses were given a new meaning:
rahu and ketu were taken to be two imaginary points of lunar and solar
intersections. With Alexander's conquest came the Greek influence that
led to the growth of Siddhantic astronomy in which zodiac signs, till
then alien concepts, became points of reference.
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"Years
before photos of historic events are published, their pictures are
present in astrological books." Lachchman
Das Madan, Editor, Babaji
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" Astrology is like
any systemised knowledge. It is only applied astronomy".
Gyatri Devi Vasudev
Editor, Astrological Magazine |
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The ancient Indians showed a keen interest in
the metaphysical character of the universe and an almost Einsteinian understanding
of time. Many Ashokan edicts (300 b.c.) have references to cosmology.
In 499 a.d., Aryabhatta wrote the Aryabhattiya which dealt with mathematical
astronomy. He declared that the earth spun on its own axis. He was an
authority on eclipses and developed a numerical alphabet and the decimal
system. And until 1605 when Johannes Kepler announced his first law, only
Indian astronomers could correctly predict the eclipses and calculate
planetary orbits.
Jyotish, or astrology, was a "Vedanga"
(a limb of the Vedas) and was closely allied with other vedangas such
as kalpa (sacrificial rituals) and niruktas (intonation method for mantras).
Scholars refer to the use of astrology in the Indian epics: Valmiki quotes
the planetary positions of Ram's birth naming his nakshatra and lagna,
while Vyasa wrote about the coming eclipses as portends of a great war.
The portends were all allegories of the theory
of karma, the ultimate basis of Indian astrology-the philosophical mysteries
as to why something happens the way it does. The karma theory says that
a person's soul (jiva) at the time of his death takes with it all the
residual effects of deeds done in his existence: good, bad and ugly. When
the planetary positions special to each individual's destiny align themselves
in a certain way, it sets the stage for payback.
The karma theory is elaborate. In the birthchart
are seen the tendencies and reactions which dictate a person's relationships,
misfortunes and windfalls. But there is always scope for redemption, and
this is where the astrology texts come in: they show how malevolent planetary
influences can be negated through occult rituals.
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