Jyotish

Jyotish has been presented as something very difficult, very mysterious -- an unattainable goal by individuals with personal agenda. This is deplorable. Most of the sciences have many more rules and complex structure and are relatively easily handled by students all over the globe. Surely, any of these individuals, if they are interested can learn jyotish. It is true that all of those who study would not become accomplished jyotishis, but then not every engineer becomes an electronics expert, nor every doctor ends up becoming a neurosurgeon -- but the basics can be learned by most. A big deal is made about mathematical expertise and how in the pre-computer era (40s 50s 60s!) astrologers used to master the math behind horoscope casting. This is a myth because most individuals used ephemeris and used interpolation math or proportional logarithm which are essentially very simple math operations and somewhat imprecise and crude compared to the output generated by modern software which actually calculates the terms and quantities from scratch and derives planetary longitudes using fairly sophisticated algorithm that have benefitted over years by data produced by the NASA jet propulsion laboratory observations. Besides, once a software has been tested and debugged, it would give consistent results, whereas, if you are calculating by hand, there is the probability of your making mistakes each time and in different places during the calculations. Software is on the whole superior provided it has been properly designed, tested and debugged.

When a child is born or a question is formulated or a new venture begun, the moment is believed to hold valuable information regarding the 'fate' and characteristics of that child, question or venture, like the seed holds all that is required to make a tree. This is the simple premise of astrology. In jyotish, the moment or epoch is associated primarily with ten indicators. These are the seven visible bodies, sun, moon, mercury, venus, mars, jupiter and saturn, the two lunar nodes, rahu and ketu, and the point on the zodiac or ecliptic belt that intersects with the local horizon. For ease of understanding, think of the zodiac as the rainbow. The point where the 'rainbow' -- that is the zodiac of constellations and signs --meets the horizon gives the rising degree. This rising degree forms the mid-point of the first house. For practical purposes, the entire sign is taken to represent the first house and the next sign (to rise) then becomes the second house and so it continues till we come to the sign that has risen completely above the horizon and this forms the 12th house.

The tenth house, is the sign that is right above our head or at the zenith. There is no logical reason behind the signs or why they are each 30 degrees long. There is a parallelism between the planetary rulership and the order of the signs, though. The sign rulerships that are clustered around the signs (assumed or axiomatically known to be) ruled by sun and moon are based on the orbits of the planets arranged around the sun, so we have gemini and virgo ruled by mercury, taurus and libra ruled by venus, aries and scorpio ruled by mars, pisces and sagittarius ruled by jupiter and aquarius and capricorn ruled by saturn. When viewing and measuring the signs, we come across some signs that are of long ascension and rise over a longer period of time in the northern hemisphere (the opposite is true for the signs in the southern hemisphere, what is long in north is short in southern hemisphere). This is caused by the obliquity of the ecliptic (in reference to the earth's plane) and leads to the observation of phenomena such as interception of the signs with some of the signs not rising at all at certain times during the year. In the higher latitudes, therefore, some recommend the use of house systems, something that is not very clearly or strongly indicated in jyotish texts.
Some argue that this is because jyotish developed in regions of earth near the equator and interception of signs is not observed there. The jury is still out on this one. One can think of the signs as being the product of the orbit of the earth around the sun and the houses as being the product of the rotation of earth around its axis. The daily and monthly/annual motion of earth in the sky lead to the creation of sign and houses. The perspective of astrology is, therefore, geocentric or perhaps more precisely, geotopocentric, as some might like to emphasize.